


The Denial Twist

by beethechange



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Blow Jobs, Dreamsharing, Light Recreational Drug Use, M/M, Slow-ish burn, brief mentions of past dream violence, definitely no lingering stares or confusing boners in here no sir, handjobs, in which i attempt to make up for unsolved’s lack of costume budget, mild and weird dirty talk, mothman plays matchmaker, possible trigger warning for anxiety, set during unsolved supernatural S4, slight mortal peril, wet dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-05-30 16:12:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 35,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15100373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beethechange/pseuds/beethechange
Summary: “This is kind of surreal,” Shane says, taking a sip of his tea. It’s piping hot and delicious, except it tastes like hot chocolate and not like tea at all. “Sort of—Wonka-esque, right? Or Alice in Wonderland.”“If you’re aiming a shot over the bow about my height you can fucking forget about it,” Ryan says, watching with interest as Shane’s cup refills by itself. “But yeah, it’s surreal. Literally, because dreams aren’t real.”Shane’s unsettled by the comment. It sets alarm bells ringing in his head but he doesn’t know why. He just wasn’t expecting Dream Ryan to be so, well—so on the nose.*Or, the one where Shane and Ryan have some really weird dreams and perhaps, eventually, some sex.





	1. Curiouser and Curiouser

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title’s from the White Stripes song “The Denial Twist." This fic is now complete. [IMPORTANT EDIT! I discovered after posting that the excellent @beaniegara has a fic with this title and it's LOVELY. Read it [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13007325).]
> 
> This fic borrows a little, conceptually, from Maggie Stiefvater’s The Raven Cycle series. It borrows rather more, spiritually, from the scene in the TV show Happy Endings where the gang realizes their friend is [Freddy Kreugering them in their dreams with sex](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J15FnOspAo0). I live in the sweet spot between rom-com and crackfic. 
> 
> This chapter's PG-13, but the fic will eventually be explicit.

*

It all starts, as trouble often does, in the middle of nowhere, with a joint and a sky full of stars.

They’re in Point Pleasant for all of about ten minutes before Shane realizes he’s not going to be able to get through this trip without a little pharmacological assistance. These tiny-ass towns make him anxious. He can jaunt around L.A. with a camera in tow all day and nobody bats an eye, but as soon as they go rural he’s hyper-aware of the stares and itchy all over with it.

He gets tired of telling people, over and over, “We’re filming for Buzzfeed,” and then shaking off a twinge of embarrassment when those people purse their lips. He knows what they’re thinking but not saying: _that’s not a real job_. Ryan’s so proud of his work, so California through-and-through, that Shane’s not even sure if he picks up on the implied slight.

Shane spots his chance when Ryan brings them to Village Pizza, one in a series of little local restaurants that capitalizes on Point Pleasant’s lore by featuring a Mothman food item _du jour_. There’s a busboy hanging around watching the filming who looks shifty in just the right way: maybe all of nineteen or twenty, shaggy hair falling over bloodshot eyes, a goofy grin plastered on his face when Shane catches him sneaking in from the back.

 _Bingo_.

They film the pizza bit, and then as Ryan’s helping the crew pack up, Shane sidles over to the dude.

“Hey man,” he says, the awkward but necessary first step in the _acquiring a controlled substance_ dance. He hasn’t had to perform it in years—it’s legal in California, and even before that Shane’s always had a guy—but he still knows it by heart.

“Hey,” the dude says, deeply suspicious, and you’d think they’d be used to nosy tourists by now.

“My friends and I are in town for a couple of days and we could really use something to make our stay go a little smoother, if you get my drift.” Shane mimes taking a toke just in case the guy does not, in fact, get his drift.

The guy blinks back surprise, as if he was expecting something else. Shane has just enough time to wonder what kind of foreign sheen L.A. has left on his flannel, whether all the acai bowls and smudging rituals have rendered him unrecognizable to most humans, before the guy nods.

“I get that. Shit’s grim, man.”

Shane’s not sure if he means the Mothman stuff or the prospect of greeting the dawning of a new day in Trump’s America, but either way he’s not wrong. Five minutes and one trip to the bathroom later the transaction’s completed, and Shane’s got a baggie containing a pair of badly-rolled joints for his trouble.

*

He saves the baggie in his pocket until they go out in the woods. Ryan starts talking about the cold more or less immediately, a near-steady stream of grumbles and exaggerated shivers that the editing team will complain about having to cut around. Shane’s looking forward to calming him down at the earliest possible opportunity.   

Ryan’s always extra keyed-up when they start filming a new season. He never says as much, but Shane knows he gets nervous: about whether he’s done enough research, what the fans will think, what Shane himself will think. He can feel Ryan working double-time to impress him, even though the whole damn point is that Shane’s never supposed to be impressed.

“Personally, I think the Mothman is more of an interdimensional being than a cryptid,” Ryan is telling him as they carefully pick their way along the dark trail, trees rising up on either side of them. Very Blair Witch meets Deliverance.  “It would explain some of his weirder effects.”

“What kind of effects would those be?” Shane asks, playing along as gamely as he can. They’ve been out here about two hours and his fingers are starting to go numb. Shane wants to whip out a joint and warm up but TJ’s always got an eagle-eye on them, either through the camera lens or not, and he’s kind of a stickler.

“People who’ve been touched by the Mothman report having strange dreams. Psychic visions. Lasting psychological effects. That kind of thing.”

“Touched by the Mothman? As in, ‘it’s okay, Ryan, show us on the doll where the Mothman touched you’?”

Ryan snorts and rams his elbow into Shane’s solar plexus, not hard but hard enough that Shane feels it through his jacket.

“Not actually touched. Like—like, spiritually touched. Had an encounter with. Was affected by.”

“Oh, like touched in the head. So… _crazy_.” 

Ryan rolls his eyes for the cameras, and just like that Shane’s warmer already. The casual jolt of pleasure that accompanies getting a rise out of Ryan is like wrapping up in a wool blanket. Part of the reason he’s still doing this is the pure, unadulterated happiness he gets from winding Ryan up, from poking at him in as many ways as he knows how and sitting back to watch the fireworks. It isn’t necessarily a feeling Shane wants to examine too closely, but he acknowledges it’s there.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Ryan says, and he does his best imitation of Shane, which is terrible. “ _I just don’t find dreams to be compelling evidence_.”

“Well, I don’t!” Shane says. “People lie all the time. Just ask doctors and every single person who’s ever stolen a pen from Fulmer’s desk at work and denied it, which is all of us. People lie, and dreams aren’t real. That’s literally the defining feature of dreams.”

Ryan laughs, maybe a little too hard, which means he knows he’s lost this round. To be clear: he loses _every_ round as far as Shane’s concerned, it’s just that sometimes he won’t admit it.

“Fair enough,” Ryan says. “Dreams aren’t real, Shane. Lucky for you, because whenever I dream about you, you end up dying in new and exciting ways.”

At that moment, in unison, both of their flashlights flicker out. Shane can feel Ryan draw a little closer to him, can hear his breathing speed up by increments. It’s amazing how fast your other senses sharpen when your primary one has been rendered next-to useless, to make up for the loss.

Shane’s struck by how very _dark_ it is out here. When you live in L.A. it’s easy to forget what actual darkness looks like. What the night sky looks like without all the light pollution and nothing but a sliver of moon to illuminate your way.

Ryan’s hovering at his left shoulder now, just touching it. His hand brushes the sleeve of Shane’s coat and pulls away.

“What the fuck?” he mutters, and Shane can tell he’s balancing right on the knife’s edge of panic already. It’s always zero to sixty with him, unease melting into genuine terror in a split second at an unexpected noise or minor mechanical malfunction.

“Chill,” Shane murmurs. “It’s just the Mothman, here to, _you know_. Touch you.”

He does a half-hearted jerk-off motion he’s not even sure Ryan can see, but he’s rewarded when Ryan makes an indignant sound in his throat like an angry cat. Something pops in Shane’s chest: a little burst of sheer joy. He recoils from it, changes tack.

“Here, check out the sky, man, it’s beautiful. I bet we could see all kinds of constellations and shit if we knew what we were looking for.”

They both crane their necks up. As they do, something like a shadow passes in front of the moon, so fast Shane can’t even be certain he’s seen it at all. An owl out hunting, probably, or an isolated patch of dense cloud. Something nature-y.

Then, as suddenly as they went out, both the Maglites flicker back to full brightness. Ryan’s eyes, when they meet Shane’s, are wider than wide in the glare of the light—with fear and, just below that, _did-you-see-that_ excitement.

“Shit, cut,” TJ says. “Something’s up with the camera.” Then he’s grabbing a flashlight of his own from his back pocket and kneeling down to fiddle with the camera, back to them, finally paying no attention. The timing’s good because Shane knows that Ryan’s about to lose his shit, he can feel it

“Come over here,” he says very quietly, hustling Ryan to the side, keeping an eye on TJ to make sure he’s preoccupied. “And for God’s sake, be quiet or Teej’ll come over here.”

“What the fuck?” Ryan says again, his voice tight and about half an octave too high. “Why would the flashlights—the camera—did you see the—what the _fuck_?”

“I dunno, man, it’s West Virginia. Weird shit happens,” Shane says. “It was an owl. I’ve got a little something to calm you down.”

Shane pulls the little baggie out of his pocket and shakes it in front of Ryan’s face.

“I don’t think our electronics know or care what state we’re in, Sh—is that _weed_?” Ryan asks, successfully distracted. “How did you get that through security?”

“How does anybody smuggle drugs through airport security?” Shane asks with a little wink, and then he laughs when Ryan’s eyes bug out. “ _Kidding_. I bought it off the kid at the pizza place today.”

“Very smooth.”

After another glance at TJ Shane lights up a joint, takes a hit, and passes it to Ryan. He was right about the quality, it isn’t great, but it’ll do. If it’s a choice between being trapped in the wilds of rural America with a hyper, twitchy Ryan Bergara and some bad weed and doing the same with _no_ weed, Shane will take his chances every time.

In record time they’ve smoked both joints between them, huddled on a damp log just out of TJ’s line of sight. Shane feels all the tension of today start to leak out of him, fucking _finally_ , and he’s warm and toasty all over, down to his fingertips and his toes. Ryan always gets loose and silly when he’s high, and right on cue he starts giggling up a storm, laughing at all Shane’s dumb jokes until Shane’s flushed with an unearned sense of accomplishment.

This might be one of his favorite versions of Ryan, better even than the scared shitless iteration and pretty much his polar opposite: boneless and easy with his smiles, relaxed past the point of caring whether he’s pressed a little too close to Shane’s side to be bro-code compliant. It’s another feeling Shane won’t let himself examine, except out of the corner his eye.

“The fuck are you two doing cuddling over there?” TJ yells over. “You know I can smell that, right?”

“Shit, it’s the cops!” Ryan whispers just loud enough for only Shane to hear, ducking his head into Shane’s shoulder for another round of giggles. Shane pulls himself together, because somebody needs to be the adult here and it sure as shit won’t be Ryan.

“We’re huddling for warmth, Teej,” Shane says. “They’re going to find our bodies over here stuck together after we die of hypothermia. The bards will sing of us. ’Twas the ineptitude of their camera man that killed them, they’ll say.”

“Fuck off, I got it working again,” TJ says. “Let’s get this show on the road.”  

Ryan takes a few deep breaths, trying to get his giggles under control. Shane claps him on the back and helps pull him up from the log.

“Come on, let’s catch us a Mothman,” he says.

Ryan leans in close.

“Shane,” he whispers, suddenly serious. “Shane! Can I tell you a secret?”

“Sure, Ry,” Shane says, letting the rare nickname roll off his tongue without thinking, hitching his coat around himself and enjoying the stretch of his legs and the peculiar floaty lightness in his head now that he’s standing again.

“I don’t really think Mothman exists.”

“No, he probably doesn’t,” Shane agrees. TJ’s headed over their way, camera in hand and rolling once more, and at once Ryan’s all business again. He takes a step back from Shane, putting distance between them, and slips back into his camera-face and camera-voice like a second skin.

“Thanks for this,” he says to Shane as they adjust their body cams to resume shooting. “I needed it.”

“The ghoulboys are back, baby!”

“Don’t call me—oh, whatever.”

*

In the wee hours of the morning, back in their room in a shitty little Quality Inn in Gallipolis, they each take a hot shower to fend off the last of the early winter chill. Shane likes to make fun of Ryan for his weakness in the face of cold, but the truth is that Shane can feel his own tolerance dipping shamefully low the longer he lives in L.A.

After his shower, Shane pulls on sweatpants and an old Buzzfeed t-shirt and clambers into his too-soft double bed. Ryan’s already curled up in the other bed, sheets pulled up almost to his chin, and he’s scrolling intently through his phone. They get this way after shoots, sometimes, especially the long-hauls; they use up all their banter for the cameras and afterwards they’re left alone with their thoughts, alone but together, and that’s okay.

More than okay. Shane relishes these moments. It’s a rare side of Ryan that he suspects not too many people get to see, comfortable and settled enough to not need to fill the gaps and silences with chatter. The pot probably helped. Shane can feel the last of it in his own bloodstream, fizzing out into languid limbs, loosening the muscles in his neck and easing him into sleep.

Shane turns off his light and rolls over on his side. He hears Ryan mumble a sleepy “G’night,” and then he’s out.

That night, Shane dreams.

*

In his dream, Shane’s back in a forest, but it’s not Mothman’s forest. The trees are bigger, fuller. He thinks this is a NorCal forest, and it all seems very familiar somehow, in that way that dreams sometimes can.

And that’s unusual too, to know that he’s dreaming. To be in the dream and to understand, _this is a dream_. Shane’s not a habitual lucid dreamer; he’s only experienced them once or twice in his life that he can recall, so it’s a novel feeling to be aware of making decisions as he makes them. 

He finds a path running parallel to a creek, and he follows it. In his waking life it’s winter, but in his dream forest it’s the height of autumn and the colors of the foliage are blisteringly bright, a spit of red and yellow and orange flame against serene blue sky. The leaf cover doesn’t usually get this bright or varied in California, and Shane supposes his mind is filling in gaps, righting wrongs, providing all the best parts of Chicago autumns for his California dreaming.

Shane rounds a bend in the creek and there’s a little red plastic table there in front of him, with a formal tea service set for two. Ryan’s sitting in a prim overstuffed armchair, feet up on the table. He’s wearing his ridiculous cryptid-hunting reflective vest and that stupid fucking helmet, and something in Shane’s brain dings in recognition again: _we’ve been here before_.

Ryan looks up at the crunch of feet on dry ground, and his smile when he sees Shane there is as bright as the leaves.

“Hey, big guy,” he says. “I guess we’re gonna catch a Foot.”

And that’s it: Shane’s dream has brought him to Willow Creek, alleged home of Bigfoot. He’s seen this table before, from above, when they came here to film. At the time it had been unsettling, imagining who might have dumped it in the middle of the woods and for what purpose, but now the purpose seems self-evident. It’s for tea.

Shane sinks down in the other armchair. It’s a little low to the ground for him, and his knees are forced uncomfortably up.   

“Rude,” he says, eyeing Ryan’s feet on the table, and Ryan pulls them down. The delicate china teacups fill up with tea, although no one has poured it.

“This is a pretty weird dream,” Ryan says, by way of making conversation, and he looks at Shane like it’s Shane’s fault, smirks at the way his knees bump against the table. But then, Shane supposes, it _is_ his fault.

“Hey, I’m not about to be dreamshamed by a figment of my own imagination,” Shane says, because it doesn’t seem right that he should have to take shit from Ryan in his own subconscious. Ryan’s brow furrows, a familiar little micro-expression Shane’s seen a million times.

Shane’s impressed by the job his subconscious has done re-creating his memories. Except for the technicolor leaves, the forest looks just as he remembers it. More to the point, Ryan’s exactly right, too. Usually in his dreams the people are weird mish-mashes of real and true, part themselves and part someone else and part something wholly invented. But this Dream Ryan is _exactly_ himself, his features and movements filled with eerie, precise Ryan-ness.

“This is kind of surreal,” Shane says, taking a sip of his tea. It’s piping hot and delicious, except it tastes like hot chocolate and not like tea at all. “Sort of—Wonka-esque, right? Or Alice in Wonderland.”

“If you’re aiming a shot over the bow about my height you can fucking forget about it,” Ryan says, watching with interest as Shane’s cup refills by itself. “But yeah, it’s surreal. Literally, right? Because dreams aren’t real.”

Shane’s unsettled by the comment. It sets alarm bells ringing in his head but he doesn’t know why. He just wasn’t expecting Dream Ryan to be so, well—so _on the nose_.

“Swallowed anything from a bottle labeled ‘Drink Me’ lately, short stuff?” Shane asks. It’s such an easy lob that he can’t not swing at it, even if just to see Ryan bristle.

“Fuck you!” Ryan says. _Perfect_.

“You still look stupid in that outfit, by the way. No self-respecting Bigfoot is going to come anywhere near you.”

A beam of sunlight glints its way through a gap in some leaves, right in Shane’s eyes; he blinks against it, bringing up a hand to peer under, and in the split second he looks away and back again, Ryan’s outfit has changed. Now he’s wearing a blue dress with a full skirt and a neat white apron. There’s a thin black satin ribbon nestled in his hair, tied up in a bow. On his feet, inexplicably, are combat boots.

The look on Ryan’s face is so shocked, and then so stone-cold furious, that Shane laughs until there are actual tears running down his cheeks. The passage of time is weird here, but it feels like entire long moments pass while Shane gives himself over to silent convulsions of glee.  Ryan just glares at him, hands folded over his chest—over his _pinafore_ —and waits him out.

“Yeah, that’s loads better,” Shane says when he gets it together enough to form words. “Butch Alice in Wonderland is your look for sure, Ryan. God.”

“ _Fuck. You._ ” Ryan says again. He stands up from the table, downs a full cup of not-tea tea in one long swig, and clomps off down the path. The layers of petticoats under his dress make it swish conspicuously and swirl out around him as he walks, and Shane loses it all over again as he gets up to follow Ryan into the forest.

“Stop, man. Hang on. I’m sorry. You look very pretty. I’m sure the Foot will love it.

Ryan swings at Shane, punches him on the arm hard enough that Shane’s sure it would bruise if this wasn’t happening inside his head.  Ryan’s scowl is _maybe_ the best thing Shane’s ever seen, either in a dream or in real life. Ryan sets off along the path again, but he looks back at Shane, waiting, and Shane follows.

They walk together through the dream forest, and if every once in a while Ryan’s shoulder bumps against Shane’s as they walk, or Shane’s fingertips brushes the soft fabric of Ryan’s skirt, it doesn’t even strike him as that strange.

Dreams aren’t real, after all, and for this reason they are freeing.

*

The next morning when Shane wakes up, stiff and sore from a mattress too soft for his back, he has the vague sensation of having dreamed a very vivid dream. He doesn’t remember the particulars of the dream itself, just the sense of it: comfort, and laughter, and the crisp smell of October back home. 

In the fleeting seconds between sleep and wakefulness he tastes a lingering _something_ in his mouth that might be chocolate. Then it’s gone, replaced with the usual stale morning breath.

Ryan’s already awake, trying to brush his teeth and pull on his jeans at the same time, and he looks about as tired as Shane feels. When he sees Shane awake and watching at him, Ryan stumbles a little and just about falls over and out of his jeans.

“He’s beauty, he’s grace, he’s Miss United States,” Shane says, a weak crack to cover his embarrassment at being caught—well, not staring exactly, but _looking_. Ryan sticks his tongue out around his toothbrush and goes into the bathroom to spit, reaching up to tap the top of the door-frame as he walks under it.

Shane doesn’t watch Ryan walk away, and so he definitely does not notice the way the defined muscles of his naked back move and flex with the stretch.

Nothing to see here, folks.

While Ryan finishes up in the bathroom, Shane gets dressed. As he pulls a button-down up over the joint of his shoulder, he notices an angry bruise on his upper arm, just below the shoulder seam of the shirt. Probably it’s from stumbling around high as fuck in the wilderness of West Virginia with nothing but two shitty Maglites, but still—it’s big and dark enough that he’s surprised he doesn’t remember getting it.

He pokes at it, just once, wincing at the inevitable sting.

Why do people do that? Poke a bruise when they know it will hurt? It’s like they just have to make sure that the logic of the universe is still working properly, that their fragile body’s still doing what it’s supposed to do.

When Ryan emerges from the bathroom, he’s clutching something in his fist that Shane can’t quite make out, and he looks sort of quietly bewildered.

“What’s up, man?” Shane asks him.

“Nothing, just. I must have slept funny or something. I feel out of it.”

“I think that weed had some weird shit in it. What’s in your hand?”

“Fuck if I know. It was in the back pocket of my jeans.”

Ryan holds up what looks like a length of black ribbon. It dangles in the light with a satiny sheen, and something catches and snags in Shane’s mind. He almost has it—and then it’s gone again, and the ribbon is just a ribbon, and Ryan’s carefully winding it up and putting it back in his pocket. For some reason Shane wishes he’d thrown it away.


	2. Do Not Be Afraid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ryan and Shane take on a common enemy who isn't Steven Lim and tragically miss out on a trip to Bellaire, Ohio's Toy and Plastic Brick Museum. Ryan faces some fears thanks to the power of meaningful cuddling and begins to harbor a Suspicion. 
> 
> Possible trigger warnings in this chapter for anxiety and brief mentions of imaginary demon-inflicted violence. Tags have been updated accordingly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In the immortal words of Albus Dumbledore: "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?" 
> 
> Future chapters will be rather less srs bzns, I promise.

*

They drive up the southeast curve of the Ohio River to Bellaire, another tiny town right on the border of Ohio and West Virginia. Ryan doesn’t know the geography of this part of the country well at all, but it’s kind of a bummer. What was once coal country has been all but abandoned by industry, and as they roll into Bellaire they’re greeted by an enormous old railroad viaduct, soot-stained and decades past its usefulness.

“Romanesque,” Shane says generously with a sweep of his arm.

“Creepy,” Ryan corrects.  

“You’re just saying that because we’re about to camp out in a perfectly benign old house for the night and you’re trying to justify your heebie-jeebies about it,” Shane says. He grabbed a quick nap early in the drive and his hair is stupidly rumpled, sticking up at all sorts of dumb angles in the back. Ryan has to grip the steering wheel to stop himself from reaching over to smooth it down.

TJ snorts from the backseat. Ryan’s not sure if he’s filming this for B-roll or just providing color commentary. He mutters “Kobe!” and throws a gummy bear backwards at where TJ’s head sounds like it might be, just to be on the safe side.

The town, population 4,278, could be charitably described as sleepy at best.

“No, it’s creepy,” Ryan insists. “They filmed part of Silence of the Lambs here, that’s how creepy it is.”

Shane just peers out the window, rubbing at his upper arm with his hand, and he doesn’t look convinced.

“Some things are just old, Ryan,” he says after a bit, well after Ryan thinks he’s abandoned the thread of the conversation for companionable silence. “Old and run-down doesn’t equal haunted. We’re all afraid of our own mortality and becoming obsolete, but maybe you should try to be a _little_ more subtle about it.” 

Shane picks up his phone and idly scrolls for a bit, and then he laughs a full-bodied, throaty, surprised laugh that echoes in the small car and makes something behind Ryan’s rib cage swoop like he’s on a rollercoaster. An irrepressible feeling of fondness battles with growing anxiety for primary control of his system.

“What?”

“They have a ‘Toy and Plastic Brick Museum’. It’s the #3 thing to do in Bellaire according to Trip Advisor.”

“Out of how many things to do?”

“Five,” Shane says. His lip twitches again. “The Bellaire House is number two, by the way. Just behind the Escape Zone.”

“Sometimes I feel like you’re not taking this seriously,” Ryan says.

The truth, of course, is that he _is_ afraid already. It’s no secret that infestation locations are his least favorite shoots, and past precedent suggests he’s justified in feeling that way. It’s not that he’s religious, exactly, at least not in any way that his family would recognize. He just has a healthy respect for things he can’t see, things he can’t know.  
  
Things that might want to rip his spine out of his back and use his nerve fibers as floss. 

Ryan swallows against the familiar churn in the pit of his stomach: _demon, demon, demon_.

*

Except this time, Shane’s right: there’s nothing creepy about the Bellaire House. Ryan’s got butterflies the whole time they’re doing their interviews, but by the time they’re exploring with the cameras he’s forced to admit—privately, anyway— that the house itself isn’t particularly frightening.

In fact, he’s got a feeling it might be kind of a scam.

His hands, when they clasp Shane’s in the dark to execute the world’s shittiest and least-researched séance, are clammy and sweaty. Ryan wants to pull them back into his lap, not because he dislikes the touch but because he wants to wipe them, embarrassed, on the legs of his jeans. Shane squeezes once, not very hard, just a wordless reassurance: _hey man,_ _it’s cool_.

Shane certainly thinks he is still afraid, and that’s fine with him.

As the night goes on and nothing particularly spooky happens, Ryan’s confidence grows. He feels different, filming this season. Hanging around nightmare asylums and haunted houses all the time, and emerging from each of them alive and well, seems to be working as exposure therapy. He still believes that ghosts and demons exist, but experience does seem to suggest that they don’t exist _everywhere_ and they don’t necessarily have the energy or will to do him any damage.

“Real talk,” Shane says later as they’re setting up their cots to go to sleep. “That woman’s lying through her fucking teeth to sell ghost tours to gullible idiots such as yourself. No offense.”

“'No offense,' he says. Why would anyone take offense at that?”

Ryan unrolls his sleeping bag, shivering against the draftiness of the attic. By the time he and Shane fall asleep in the Bellaire House, stomachs full of surprisingly decent pizza, Ryan’s pretty confident that there are no demons in this house except the ones they brought in with them.

That night, for the first time in a long time, Ryan dreams about Kansas.

*

Ryan’s first instinct, when he realizes where he is, is to curl up in a very small ball on the couch and just let the demon fucking have him. _Not again_. _I don’t want to do this again_.

He told Shane he’d never come back here, but unfortunately his brain doesn’t always listen to his mouth. Sometimes, when he’s stressed or exhausted or upset, his subconscious sends him back to the Sallie House. Like it’s the epicenter of all his fears: a mental space where he can put his anxieties up on the shelves, admire them, let them do their worst, and then shut the door on them and walk away for a while.

Ryan gets up from the musty couch and squares his shoulders. “Do not be afraid, do not be afraid, do not be afraid,” he says to himself, over and over. _Get in the game, Bergara._ _There’s nothing in your own head that can hurt you._

That’s not even true. There are things in his head that could cut him open pretty bad, but it makes him feel better anyway.

Resigned, he starts to explore the house. The dreams always start out this way: Ryan’s scared, he starts to get brave, he explores. Sometimes he’s alone, and sometimes Shane’s there. Sometimes he finds Shane in the basement, pinned to the spot where the pentagram was, begging the _thing_ in this house to let him go, like the real Shane would never do. Sometimes he finds Shane dead.  Sometimes Ryan flees the house, like he did in real life, and has to live with the shame of it all over again.

But no matter what he never makes it through the night.

He finds Shane sitting cross-legged on the floor of the upstairs bedroom, the baby’s room, organizing stuffed animals into a little cult circle. He’s wearing that red and black Buffalo-check button-down, the one Ryan used to really like until his brain went out of its way to ruin it for him. He’s never mentioned it to Shane, but Shane’s stopped wearing it in real life anyway.

“Hey Ryan,” Shane says, and if Ryan didn’t know better he’d say Shane looks relieved. “You’re just in time for the ritual sacrifice.”

“Great, what are we sacrificing?” Ryan asks, plopping down on the floor. Even if this one does eventually end with Shane writhing on the basement floor and not in a fun way, Ryan’s still glad to see him. Like he always is.

“Just your dignity, as per usual,” Shane says with a wink. It’s such a _Shane_ mannerism that Ryan looks around in spite of himself, searching for the camera he knows isn’t there.

“Yuk it up, dude,” Ryan says. “You should, um. You should know that these dreams usually go pretty badly for me. For us.”

Shane shrugs, an awkward slope-shouldered gesture that’s so precisely how he shrugs in real life that Ryan wants to pinch himself.

“Yeah, well, it’s just a dream. One time I dreamed I was being drowned in a giant bathtub by a python, only the python had the face of Steve Buscemi. It can’t be worse than that.”

“Sometimes it’s worse than that,” Ryan warns.

“Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” Shane says. Ryan doesn’t know what that could possibly mean, what Shane could possibly do, but it’s reassuring to hear all the same. “Why here, though, I wonder.”

“I don’t know,” Ryan says, but it feels like a lie. He can’t remember if he’s ever told the real Shane about this particular recurring nightmare, but the twinge of discomfort he’s feeling now suggests not. He course-corrects. “Sometimes I just come here. When I’ve got something to work out, or whatever.”

“It’s like a demon therapist,” Shane says with a nod, like he understands. “When I get anxious about work stuff I have stress dreams where I’m back at Pamela Donnelly’s fifteenth birthday party and I’ve been dared to make out in a closet with her sister Becky and I end up barfing on her because I’ve had six Mike’s Hard Lemonades.”

“Now that’s dark,” Ryan says, wheezing.

“And don’t forget it’s 2001, so that fucking Shaggy song is playing on loop. I’d like to see Sallie top that shit. Capable middle-aged African American woman though she may be.” 

“It’s usually just your run-of-the-mill possession, torture, and murder scenarios,” Ryan says, ignoring the jab. “I’m not that creative, apparently. But whatever it is, we never last the night here.”

“Challenge accepted,” Shane says. He stands up abruptly, rubs his palms together, and then holds out a hand to haul Ryan up too. “Where to?”

“We have to go down to the basement,” Ryan says. “Where the—where the pentagram was. Is. That’s usually where shit goes down.”

“We could do that,” Shane says thoughtfully, steepling his fingers, staring down at Ryan over his hands. Ryan recognizes this expression, which suggests impending mischief, and he doesn’t care for it except on those occasions in which it’s being aimed at Steven Lim. “Or.”

“What do you mean, _or_?” Ryan asks. He always goes down to the basement, in the end. The only thing worse than whatever happens down there is the way he feels when he tries to ignore it: the sick feeling of dread, of waiting for the worst to find him. An actual therapist would have a field day with it, if Ryan let them.

“What if—and stay with me here—we _don’t_? What if we just…go to bed?”

Something about the way Shane’s phrased it, and the defiant gaze he’s leveled at Ryan, makes Ryan’s pulse race with adrenaline. He can feel his wrists throbbing with it, with the audacity of just telling the demon to go fuck itself and crawling into bed with this enormous tree of a man.

“You mean we just go to sleep like it’s not happening?”

“Yeah, sure,” Shane agrees with a dismissive flick of his hand.

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried that.”

“Trying new things is healthy, Ryan,” Shane says, “Even in dreams. Maybe _especially_ then, where there are no consequences. You need somebody to bust you out of your rut.” There’s a gleam in Shane’s eyes that Ryan can’t interpret. So far this dream isn’t playing out like the others, and he’s willing to see where it goes.

Without talking about it, they go back downstairs, back to the living room, as if to lay out their sleeping bags next to each other on the floor again. But they don’t have to, they don’t get a chance, because—

There’s a massive four-poster bed in the middle of the living room where the couch had been, taking up pretty much the whole space. The linens are pure white, with big white fluffy pillows and filmy white curtains draped around the outside like nearly-opaque mosquito netting. It looks like a bed Ryan’s little cousin would put her Barbie to sleep in.

The room has to be over a hundred degrees—heat is radiating up from the floorboards—and humid as a sauna. Little beads of sweat form on Ryan’s brow and upper lip before he even has time to realize it’s happening.  

Shane raises his eyebrows, taking in the bed, and Ryan isn’t yet so warm that he can’t feel himself blush. He really doesn’t think he should be held accountable for this strange little slip of the subconscious. What are dreams for, if not embracing all the weird shit that goes down barefacedly and with a total lack of shame?

“This gives me a great idea for a new Unsolved spin-off,” Shane says. “We can call it ‘Haunted House Flip.’ This is a move-in=ready villa with stunning ocean views on the tropical island of San Salvador that just needs a quick little exorcism and a coat of paint.”

“Fuck off,” Ryan says, but he’s relieved that Shane, perhaps sensing a genuine sore spot, isn’t going to make this into a thing. Has opted to not give him shit for once in his life.

Then there’s nothing left to do but climb into the bed and under the covers and wait.

Ryan can sense the demon downstairs, rattling around directly below them, its rage and impatience growing, but the idea of it penetrating the flowy, peaceful-looking curtains seems somehow laughable. It’s like how everyone knows that tucking your feet under the covers means the monster under the bed can’t get them.

Shane strips off his button-down and the t-shirt underneath it, so he’s bare-chested, and takes off his belt. He folds the shirts neatly and places them on the TV stand. Ryan gapes. He really didn’t think this was going to be _that_ kind of dream.

“Is this a no-consequences thing?” Ryan asks dumbly.

“No, it’s an it’s-boiling-in-here thing, so chill. Probably something to do with the pit to hell that’s opened in the basement.”

Shane climbs in the bed after Ryan. The curtains around the bed are moving gently of their own accord, although there’s no breeze to speak of. It’s exactly like all of the times they’ve shared a bed together on a shoot, except Shane’s half-naked, there’s an actual demon in the house with them, and they’re lying on a magical bed that looks like Cinderella should be banging Prince Charming in it for reasons Ryan is unwilling to examine just now. 

“Shane?” Ryan says tentatively. The energy in the living room has changed. He thinks the demon has left the basement, that it’s in the room with them right now, just outside the curtains. Every once in a while he sees a shadow slip around the corner of a bedpost, trying to get in past the white gauze. There’s a dull roar that might be his fear playing tricks on him, but also might be the _thing_.

“It’s okay. It can’t get us in here,” Shane says. “For some God-forsaken dream logic reason, and also because I say so.”

Ryan’s heart clenches once in his chest, like fingers closing into a fist, and then he _hears_ it.

_Your work isn’t good enough, Ryan. Your friends are only pretending to like you, Ryan. You’re an insecure mess every waking moment of your life, Ryan. No one will ever love you as much as you love them, Ryan._

“I’ve never lasted the night here,” Ryan says. “I don’t know why, but I’m—I’m not allowed. I’m not _allowed_ , Shane—” He can hear himself getting hysterical, losing his grip, and the shadow outside the curtains is growing.

_You’re an embarrassment to your family, Ryan. You make mediocre videos on the internet instead of doing something worthwhile with your life. You hide behind a confident, charming facade but they all see right through you, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan._

Ryan curls his fingers into his palm so hard that his fingernails leave little half-moon imprints there. He starts to hyperventilate, just a little, hearing the demon put words to the thoughts that keep him up Tweeting late into the night when he should be sleeping.

“Ryan—Ryan, whoa, Jesus. You’re allowed if I say you’re allowed. It’s just a dream. Dreams aren’t real, they can’t hurt us. We will be fine, but you have to breathe.”

The _us_ and the _we_ give Ryan a little flare of bravery. He reaches up and out into the moonlit space between them to touch Shane’s bare arm, and then he pulls back when Shane winces.

_This one thinks you’re a stupid little baby, he says so himself all the time. See, he can’t even stand for you to touch him. Soon he’s going to get tired of you and leave, and then where will you be?_

“You’re fine,” Shane says again. “Just a bruise.” It strikes Ryan, even here in the middle of this panic attack, as a weird detail for his brain to provide. Oddly specific and precise.

Ryan makes a strangled noise in his throat, and then Shane is sighing and closing the gap between them, manhandling Ryan to turn him around, pulling him in close so Ryan’s back is against his bare chest.  This level of contact is so unprecedented between them that it shocks Ryan out of his haze, just for a moment. But that moment is enough.

‘It’s all in your head, man,” Shane says low in his ear. “You’ve got to stop doing this to yourself.  I’m not sure what you’re seeing or hearing right now, but it isn’t real.   _This_ is real.” He reaches around and up to tap on Ryan’s collarbone with his finger, three sharp taps.

“The fucking demon, Shane. Don’t you hear it?”

“I do,” Shane says, but he doesn’t elaborate. Ryan wonders what Shane is hearing, what the demon is hissing in his ears, and he prays it’s not his own anxieties laid bare. “But it’s, you know, a dream-demon. A _dreamon_.”

After all that, it’s the stupid pun that does the trick. Ryan relaxes back into Shane a little, and the waves of panic start to recede. He can feel the exact moment his logical mind clicks back into place, rendering his fear suddenly absurd the moment it evaporates. He notices in a detached sort of way that Shane’s hand is on his own, holding it open so he can’t clench it, can’t deepen the fingernail marks on his palms any more.

The demon’s still there; he can no longer hear its words but he can hear it rustling around the room, looking for a weakness, a chink in their armor. But tonight, for some reason, he’s impenetrable. As soon as Ryan realizes it he’s exhausted, hurtling toward sleep, and his eyes are dragging themselves closed of their own accord.

“You can go to sleep,” Shane says, very quietly. “I’ll stay up and keep watch. It won’t get in.”

“What happens when you fall asleep in a dream?” Ryan asks.

“Probably you just wake up. Either that or you hurtle into a dreamless cursed sleep like Sleeping Beauty and a handsome prince has to ride in on a white stallion and non-consensually make out with you.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Ryan says, just a hair’s breath from dropping off to sleep. Then, in the instant before it happens he has a realization. “Wait, hang the fuck on. Pamela and Becky Donnelly—Pam and Rebecca—the _fucking Hot Daga_ , you enormous loser—”

Shane starts to snicker into the back of his neck, making Ryan shiver in a not-unpleasant way.

“It’s a deeply personal tale of love and loss,” Shane says, and then he’s laughing for real. Ryan feels Shane’s chest and stomach shaking with it, against his back through the thin fabric of his t-shirt, and he can’t help but laugh too: at the infectiousness of Shane’s laugh, at the absurdity of this whole situation.

And then Ryan wakes up on an uncomfortable cot in Ohio alone, with weak winter sunlight streaming in through a streaky attic window.

*

Well, not completely alone. Shane’s there, the way he’s always there, on another cot just out of reach. Ryan’s still cackling, like he’s laughed his way out of the dream and into wakefulness.

“What’s funny?” Shane asks, rolling over in his sleeping bag, still blinking sleep out of his eyes.

“We made it, dude! I can’t believe we made it all night.”

“What are you talking about?” Shane says, nonplussed. “When we fell asleep you still had some pizza grease on your dumb face. Of course we _made it_.”

Ryan waves his hand at Shane, who after all couldn’t be expected to understand the gravity of what he’s managed in the night. What they’ve managed together, in a way. He’s giddy with the relief of it. He thinks maybe he can leave the Sallie House behind now, find some new place to store his anxieties, somewhere safer that the sunlight can reach.

It’s like a scab has fallen off to reveal fresh, shiny new skin in its place.

Shane sits up to stretch, and as he does the sleeping bag creeps down enough to reveal that he isn’t wearing his shirt. He was definitely wearing it when they fell asleep, Ryan knows, because they both complained mightily about how cold it was up here. He himself had layered up like he was going to fight a land war in Siberia.

“Huh,” Shane says, unzipping his bag. He pokes around the attic for a bit until he finds his shirt on a table a few feet away, his belt piled on top of the neatly-folded fabric. “That’s weird. I must have gotten warm in the night and taken it off. I don’t remember doing it.”

“It’s freezing up here,” Ryan points out. “Why would you?”

“Who knows? Sleeping people do that stuff all the time,” Shane says, and he’s not wrong—except that Ryan knows he kind of is.

Ryan looks down at the palm of his hand, at the little half-moon imprints that are pressed into the skin there, and another wave of giddiness overtakes him like nausea. He remembers the black ribbon tucked in his jeans, and then: a flash of an idea—an impossible idea— _no way_. He shoves it aside.

“We’ll leave this in the video. Give the fans a little thrill, straight to their nethers, at the sight of your weedy chest.”

“Jesus Christ, Ryan. Never say the word ‘nethers’ again if you want to live.”

Ryan doesn’t think to check the overnight footage until weeks later, when he’s editing the episode. There’s a camera set up the whole night, trained directly on them. Shane crawls into his sleeping bag at 1:48 am with his shirt on, and he wakes up at 8:05 am shirtless. But in that time, he doesn’t get up once.


	3. Summer Lovin' Torture Party

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shane has a dream about a pretty weird dance party. Hot palm-on-palm action ensues. Someone's wearing a codpiece and it's probably who you expect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don't have a passing familiarity with Shane's favorite incidence of mass hysteria, the [Dancing Plague of 1518](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518), this chapter might not make a ton of sense to you.
> 
> The dance I'm envisioning is something like a volta, which was quite sexy by 16th century standards I'm told. In case you are curious to see it in action, [here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq4y4nQqXpw) the boring historically-accurate version and [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HCjYuPEm3M%22) is the sexy Hollywood version. 
> 
> The line "I've got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell" is from [SNL](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa9Zg6yGlQ4).

The Horrors of Deindustrialized Ohio 2018 tour rumbles on, two hours back west to Mansfield, home of the Ohio State Reformatory. Shane and TJ both offer to drive, but Ryan’s pumped up about something still and he just shakes his head and says he’s got it. Shane busies himself trying to find a radio station that’ll get something other than country music or top 40 pop hits.

“Not the most thrilling Unsolved shooting trip you’ve ever planned,” Shane says as the car makes its way along I-70, too many cars and not enough lanes. Ryan’s threading their rental past other cars so aggressively that TJ, in the backseat again with their gear, braces himself against the back of Shane’s headrest.

“It can’t all be jazz shows and pub crawls, dude,” Ryan says. “We’ve got to go where the ghosts lead us.”

“How’s that working out for you so far?” Shane asks, a rhetorical question more than anything else, and so he’s surprised when Ryan shoots him a quick sidelong glance.

“That’s news to me,” Shane murmurs, because from where he’s sitting this season’s shaping up to be a bit fat L for the Boogaras. Ryan just shakes his head, tapping out a nervous rhythm on the steering wheel.

“We can talk about it later. Maybe. I’m still not even sure there’s anything to talk about.”

Ryan’s jittery the whole drive, and the whole time they’re getting their establishing shots of the Reformatory, and the whole time they’re filming. It’s a beautiful, imposing-as-hell building that Shane knows is going to look great on camera, but Ryan’s vibe is weirding him out.

The fourth or fifth time Ryan cuts Shane off with a brusque, borderline-mean little comment and then zooms off to explore another part of the building without so much as a backward glance to see if they’re keeping up, Shane meets TJ’s eyes over the camera. He has no idea what’s gotten into Ryan tonight.

He should have saved one of those joints.

“Is he okay?” TJ asks.

“’Roid rage,” Shane jokes. “Yes, the biceps, but _at what cost_?”

When TJ doesn’t crack a smile, Shane tries again. “I think he just needs to run off some nervous energy. You know how he gets. We should get him a little travel wheel, like hamsters have, and haul it around the country with us.”

“Well, deal with it, would you? It’s making for some strange footage.”

“I’m not his keeper,” Shane says, but TJ just levels him with a look. A capital-L Look. _Another one for the don’t-think-about-it pile._

Later that night, after Ryan snaps at him again, Shane pulls him aside. He tries not to take it personally when Ryan hastily ducks his shoulder to evade Shane’s hand and does a little pivot away, like he’s already on his way to somewhere more important.

“Do you need to go outside and do wind sprints for a few minutes or something?”

“What are you talking about? I’m fine. This is just our banter. I’m bantering.”

Ryan worries at his lip a little with his teeth. He keeps doing this thing where he looks at Shane and then looks away as soon as Shane notices him looking. Shane’s spent the whole day wiping at his face to check for food clinging there from lunch.

“Not—not exactly, though, Ryan.”

“It’s just been a strange couple of days. I haven’t been sleeping great.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Shane agrees. Ryan’s looking up at him, making very purposeful eye contact with a wide chipmunk-adjacent expression that Shane thinks is supposed to be meaningful, only he can’t figure out the meaning. “But we’ll be on our way home tomorrow, so let’s just push through.”

*

That night, back in the hotel room, Shane’s annoyed to discover they’ve been stuck in a room with a king bed instead of two doubles. It’s nearly two in the morning, way too late to bother changing rooms for just a couple of hours’ sleep, but the prospect of sharing space with Ryan when he’s this prickly is less than appealing.

They’re both too tired to even shower. Shane collapses straight on the bed after brushing his teeth, still in his clothes. Ryan putters around a little bit, packing and unpacking and repacking his bag, checking all their gear, making sure everything’s powered down.

“Dude, chill out,” Shane says. “Just get in bed so I can turn this light out.”

“Do you think the hotel gym is still open?” Ryan asks. Shane squints up at him and can see even across the room how twitchy he looks, pacing back and forth from the bathroom to his bag to the desk where they’ve set what little equipment TJ can bear to let out of his sight for eight hours.

“It’s 2 am, so no. You can go first thing in the morning, our flight’s not until noon. Just get in the damn bed.”

A few minutes later, the bed moves as Ryan settles himself down on the other side, as close to the far edge as possible. Shane doesn’t open his eyes, but he can sense Ryan watching him.

“’Sup?” Shane slurs out, roused from the brink of sleep. Ryan sighs.

“These last few days. I feel—I think something’s different.”

“What kind of different?”

“Just, I don’t know. Just different. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel, like. Watched?”

“I feel watched by _you_ ,” Shane says, a barely-coherent mumble now. “You’ve been gawping at me all day and then skittering away hollering f-bombs when I get within three feet of you.”

“I’m not skittering right now,” Ryan says.

Shane can tell that Ryan wants to unburden himself about something, and he wishes he could summon the energy to humor him, but he just can’t. Not tonight. They’ve been in Ohio for four long days and three somehow longer nights, and he misses his own bed and his own shower that’s tall enough for him and he can’t.

He can tell that whatever’s got Ryan riled up is going to require mental space to untangle—maybe even emotional space—and he just _can’t._ He’s too tired. He’s not ready.

“Please, can we talk about it in the morning? I’m so wiped.” Ryan hums his assent, and Shane finally lets himself relax into sleep.

*

When Shane opens his eyes, he’s in sixteenth-century France. He can’t explain how he knows this to be true. He just _knows_ it, the way sometimes in a dream you’re blessed with the absolute certainty of knowing. That’s where he is, and when he is, and that’s that.

He’s in a busy town square, cobblestones underfeet, street vendors peddling their wares. It’s all a little neater than it should be, a little cleaner. There’s no shit anywhere, at least, which according to his late-night Wikipedia history spirals doesn’t seem period-accurate. He can see the cathedral rising up in the distance, picturesque and perfect. It’s unbearably hot, midsummer sun beating down, but it doesn’t smell bad—which is also wrong.

It’s like sixteenth-century France by way of Beauty and the Beast. He could probably go buy a basket of eggs from a genial shopkeep right now if he wanted to, straight out from under a hen’s ass.

Shane looks down at himself. He’s wearing a linen shirt, and over that a long, stiff, embroidered brocade jacket-dress sort of thing. On his legs are a snug pair of—breeches, he guesses, or hose. He feels silly, but also surprisingly comfortable.

In the near distance there’s the strains of music playing: a lute, and a harp, and something low and sweet like an oboe. He looks again at the jagged shape of Strasbourg Cathedral against the sky, backlit in spectacular relief by the sun, and he thinks, _you’ve got to be fucking kidding me._

Shane follows the music to an adjacent square and he sees exactly what he was expecting to see: dozens of people dancing in rows, swirling around each other. Women in glorious gowns of all colors and men in finely-embroidered jackets orbiting each other like planets, grimaces frozen on their faces.

Off to the side, not too far from the musicians who have set up out of the way of the dancers, Shane spots Ryan standing there, shifting his weight back and forth in time to the music. Because _of course._ In his waking life, Ryan is everywhere. Why should his head be any different?

Ryan stands out like a sore thumb because he’s got a giant Elizabethan ruff around his neck and an equally conspicuous codpiece hanging around his waist. Shane wants to laugh, but it feels mean. There’s already something so uniquely vulnerable about a man in a skirt and dick-pouch.

“Nice codpiece,” Shane says, addressing the elephant in the room. “Your ruff’s about fifty years too early, by the way. No wonder nobody’s asked you to dance.”

Ryan blushes, or maybe he’s just pink from how warm it is, but his smile is big and genuine.  

“I did the best I could. I don’t know this stuff as well as you,” he says. Shane doesn’t know what that means, exactly, but the way Ryan’s adjusting the codpiece is _very_ distracting so he doesn’t spend much time on it.

“Have you figured it out yet?” Shane asks, nodding his head at the dancers.

“They’ve been doing this for the whole time I’ve been here. The dancing.”

Shane doesn’t like the idea that Ryan was there before him, waiting. It makes him uncomfortable to imagine his dreams starting before he gets there or ending well after he leaves. Like going upstairs and going to sleep while your own house party continues to rage in your living room.

“Yeah, they’re going to keep dancing, too. Forever. They’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell.”

He can see the minute it clicks for Ryan, because the sun-bright smile fades and his eyes bug out a little in surprise.

“Oh my God, the—the fucking _dancing plague_. Are you kidding me? They’re just going to—they’re just going to keep dancing until they _die_?”

“Mass hysteria’s a hell of a drug,” Shane says by way of agreement. The music changes, something slower now, and the dancers slow their pace to match. They’re basically just walking now, in figures they all seem to know by heart, occasionally bringing their fingertips together to touch before orbiting away again.

In the face they all look like zombies, wrecked and worn out to their breaking point. Shane identifies with the way they seem to be fraying at the edges, even though it’s way too early in the season’s filming to be feeling this way.

What Shane can’t figure out is why his brain knows the steps, how it’s moving all these little chess pieces in tandem. Too many nights spent falling asleep watching trashy costume dramas on Netflix, probably.

“It’s not what I pictured.” Ryan frowns as the dancers walk painfully slowly in circles like pinwheels. “Do you think the musicians are like, why don’t these stupid fuckers just _stop_?”

“You were imagining a rave?” Shane asks.

He sort of agrees. Intellectually he always knew that this was what dancing looked like in 1518, but when you imagine people dancing themselves to death the mind inevitably conjures something a little more frantic. This is almost genteel, for mass suicide.

Romantic, even, in a doomed Romeo-and-Juliet kind of way.

Ryan doesn’t answer. He picks at a thread on his doublet, a beautiful dark red piece of cloth with elaborate designs stitched on in cloth of gold and pearl. Then he reaches up to untie his ruff, pulling it off to expose a stretch of neck that must only seem noteworthy to Shane because everybody else is covered from chin to foot. In that context, the bare golden skin of Ryan’s neck and throat as he swallows is distracting, like an illicit glimpse of a lady’s ankle under a gown.

In real life Shane wouldn’t allow himself to stare, but here he can’t come up with a compelling reason not to. Ryan sees him looking, of course, and raises a self-conscious hand to rub at his Adam’s apple. Shane’s fingers itch.

The music speeds up again, and the dancers fall back into partnered pairs, mostly men and women together, and Shane feels—for perhaps the first time in his life—the irrepressible urge to dance. It just feels like the thing to do. He can’t die, not like these poor schmucks, because it’s his dream.

Shane turns to Ryan and, because he knows he’s supposed to, without even thinking about it, he gives a little bow. When he straightens his back again, Ryan’s looking up at him full in the face, brow furrowed like he’s trying to work something out.

Then he gives a twitchy little shrug, a why-the-fuck-not shrug, and he bows back.

“Well I don’t know how to curtsey,” Ryan says, belligerent. Like it’s going to be a fight. Everything’s like that with him lately, fighting or laughing or— _or_.

“I didn’t need you to curtsey, _Milord_ ,” Shane says, and he leads Ryan out into the dancing by the sleeve of his jacket.

“Oh man, I’m going to make you call me that all the time. I, uh, don’t know what I’m doing,” Ryan says, with a nervous swallow. Shane almost can’t hear him over the way the sweaty skin of his neck is gleaming, blinking at him like a lighthouse on the rocks Shane’s about to wreck himself on.  

“Neither do I, but it feels right, doesn’t it? Like we’re supposed to?”

“If every dream person in medieval France jumped off a dream bridge, Shane, would y--“

Shane gives Ryan a little shove, out into the middle of it.

It does feel a little frantic, now. The swinging of fabric, and the complicated hopping steps they both seem to almost—but not quite—know, and the heavy, insistent beat the musicians are keeping make Shane feel drunk.

He and Ryan circle each other, come together to spin, fall apart again, repeat. It’s strange to dance with someone but not touch, but Shane finds he rather likes it. There’s _intention_ there that he misses in club dancing. Complete awareness of your space, and your partner’s presence in your space, and out of it, and in it again. Two cogs in a wheel that need each other to make something bigger, and all the dancing pairs coming together to etch out a bigger pattern still.

He meets Ryan in the middle of the sliver of cobbles they’ve carved out for themselves. They do touch then, following the lead of the other dancers, bringing their palms together to walk in a slow circle. Ryan’s palm against Shane’s, the only point of connection between their bodies, is radiating warmth.

If it weren’t for the whole death thing, Shane thinks, this would be almost unbearably sexy. _Palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss._ He always wondered why Romeo and Juliet threw away their lives for a few dances and a fuck, but now he almost gets it.

Because he’s dreaming—because it’s _safe_ —Shane can acknowledge that, can push the feeling over to Ryan through the fragile skin between their palms. What’s the harm?

Around them, as if they read Shane’s thoughts, men are picking up their partners and swirling them in the air in perfect, precise three-quarter turns. Up, and twirl, and down.

“Wait, what’s happening now?” Ryan asks, alarmed, but Shane’s already pulling him in, lifting him in time with the beat, holding their bodies close just for the duration. Shane’s not sure whether he could easily lift Ryan like this in real life. Ryan’s compact but strong, all muscle like Shane’s all leg, but here in Shane’s own head he knows he can, and so he does.  

Ryan’s breath catches in his throat as the length of his body presses flush against Shane’s, the briefest slide of chest to chest, hip to hip, thigh to thigh. Shane wishes he could bottle this feeling and store it for when he needs it.

The contact after the build-up, better than nothing but not nearly enough, is agonizing.

The song ends and Ryan pulls away from him, breathing hard, a sweaty mess of slick skin and damp fabric. They didn’t exert themselves that much, but the summer heat and the sweltering clothes make it feel like a club at 3 am, bodies pressing in from all sides. 

“Is that a baguette in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” Shane jokes.

“It’s the codpiece,” Ryan says. He looks pointedly at Shane, who has no such excuse. “I’m tired of dancing in circles with you, man.”

As if on cue, Shane can feel the dream shifting under his feet as Ryan moves in close again. The music changes, to something modern with a strong bass and an electronic pulse. The town square goes dark, as if someone’s flipped a switch on the sun.

Shane gets the strange idea, even though it’s impossible, that this is no longer a dream of his brain’s own devising.

“Gives a whole new meaning to DJ Dead Body,” he says.

“Come here,” Ryan says, and he grips Shane by the hips and _pulls_. His neck’s got body paint on it that wasn’t there before, a bright neon green glow-in-the-dark handprint across his Adam’s apple, lit up by an invisible blacklight that shouldn’t exist here.

This is something different, something out of Shane’s control, and he starts to panic. It’s only Ryan’s hand on the small of his back that keeps him moving in a way that is technically dancing, that keeps him grounded.

“What are you playing at?” Shane asks, loud over the music. He doesn’t know what makes him think to ask it, and if he was asked to explain the question he wouldn’t be able to.

Glitter falls from the ceiling—no, from the sky, Shane reminds himself—like rain, sticking to their skin. Ryan _rolls_ his head back to meet it, the paint on his neck stark, and Shane reaches down to match his thumb to the thumbprint there. Ryan’s pulse beats fast beneath his finger, and there’s the sound of rain dimly in the back of his head, and then—

The dream crumbles beneath him, too fragile to hold him up any longer, and he falls.

*

Shane wakes up in a big bed in a Fairfield Inn near Mansfield, right at the cusp of daylight, with perhaps the most confusing boner of his life. There’s been some stiff competition for that honor over the years, pun very much intended, but this one’s a contender.  

For a moment he hears rain again, and then he realizes it’s just the shower running. Ryan, probably after an early visit to the hotel gym, and _please God let him have been awake for ages_.

This time the details of his dream are so vivid he could reach out and touch them, and not fading any time soon. Shane lies there under the covers, very pointedly not thinking about any of it, and waits for his problem to go away. He’s sweaty all over, and the sheets are sweaty beneath him, like he was really dancing.

By the time the shower shuts off, Shane deems it safe—from his dick’s perspective, at any rate—to get up. He does so, scrubbing his hand over his face to get the sleep out of his eyes, tugging his hand through the disaster of hair on his head.

His hand encounters something gritty, and he pulls it back. There’s glitter on it, clinging in between his fingers, sticking to his nailbeds. He reaches up again, shakes his hair out, and a little waterfall of glitter pours down around his ears.

He doesn’t have time to do much more than stare at his hand in dumbfounded disbelief and wipe it on the comforter before Ryan emerges from the bathroom, dressed in comfortable traveling clothes: sweatpants and a hoodie, a towel wrapped around his neck, hair still damp from his shower.

Ryan takes one look at him and— _grimaces_. Visibly flinches. Shane’s sure he looks like a hot mess right now, but that seems like an overreaction.

“It’s not that bad,” Shane says. His head is spinning, whirring into motion to come up with a rational explanation that will satisfy Ryan and himself.

“You look like a disco ball that got hit by a train,” Ryan says. His mouth is a tight line, and the ribbing Shane’s expecting doesn’t come. Neither does the inquisition. There’s glitter all over his face and his hair and his shirt and Ryan’s not even laughing at him.

“I must have picked it up at the Reformatory last night. They do tourist shit there all the time, Halloween tours and parties and stuff,” Shane says, when Ryan doesn’t ask. “The curse of being this tall, I guess. Must’ve rested my head on some spot they don’t clean.”

That is reasonable, he thinks. Entirely plausible. Almost certainly that’s what happened. Well done him.

“It’s January,” Ryan points out. He reaches over, picks a piece of glitter off the tip of Shane’s nose, and flicks it away.

Shane shuffles for the bathroom, desperate to wash the glitter out of his hair and the sweat off his back. He’s almost to the bathroom when he remembers.

“Was there something you wanted to talk about last night?” he asks. Before they went to sleep Ryan had been teetering on the verge of telling him something, restless and irritable with it. Like a house elf with a secret.

He can pinpoint the exact moment when Ryan decides to lie, which isn’t that impressive because he’s not very good at it. His face—usually so open, at least for Shane, and wonderfully expressive—snaps closed.

“Nope,” Ryan says, and his voice is artificially bright and just a hair louder than it needs to be. “Nothing. I’m sorry I was a such a pill. I just needed a good workout. Needed to sweat off some energy.”

Shane knows he should push, but he doesn’t.  He just makes a little more room in the mental box of things he’s not thinking about, tucks it in there, and slams it shut.

*

In the shower, washing the glitter out of his hair as best he can, Shane feels a little better. It all feels a lot more reasonable once the glitter’s mostly gone, although he knows he’ll be finding specks of it on his body for days or weeks.

But as he’s getting out of the shower, toweling himself off vigorously, he notices a tiny wet green smear on the tile of the shower wall. Just a little neon smudge of paint, barely even there. It’s going to linger for longer than the glitter, that smudge.

*

Back in L.A., life returns to normal. Weeks and blissful weeks of normal.

When Shane thinks back to his time in Ohio, such as it was, he feels tired to his bones, jittery and unsettled. The spate of half-remembered lucid dreaming was strange, but he dismisses it as an anomaly brought on by stress and bad weed.  

Dreams, as they inevitably do, fade.

But that smudge, though. The smudge follows them to Savannah.


	4. Hold on to Your Butts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Ryan's chicken comes home to roost and it's bigger than he expected and also decidedly less evolved; Shane's Richard Attenborough accent is on point; and everybody's got their fight face on. This chapter is rated mature for approximately 1/16th of a handjob, and going forward this fic will earn its explicit rating. Also, um, I'm sorry.
> 
> This chapter inspired by [this photo](https://imgur.com/a/L0HyRTb) of Shane during the filming of the Boysenberry Festival video. 
> 
> If you haven't seen the original Jurassic Park you should go watch it on Netflix now and then come back.

Savannah in March is a lot nicer than Ohio in January. It’s a fun town, but really Ryan’s just glad to be below the Mason-Dixon line, where the temperature’s above fifty degrees.

Ryan’s not taking this one as seriously as perhaps he should be, but in his defense, Shane’s mustache is making that prospect very, very difficult. It’s just looking at him, all the time.

It’s like the void: he looks at Shane and Shane’s mustache looks back.

He can’t summon even a little fear as long as it’s perched there on Shane’s lip, and he tells Shane so as they’re getting ready to film. TJ’s running a few lighting tests; his stated goal for this season is to make them both look like they’re slowly dying of typhoid fever, and he’s fuckin’ nailing it.

“I can’t believe you’ve done this to me,” Ryan says, making a little mustache-twirling gesture with his finger. “I feel like I’m filming a segment of _To Catch a Predator_. Nobody’s going to watch the ep. They’re going to click on it, see that _thing_ on your face, and click out.”

“They already call me a demon and a cryptid,” Shane says easily. He’s apparently unperturbed by the fact that Ryan, as well as all right-thinking people, currently find him disgusting. “I’m just leaning into it.”

“I feel like you think this is charming. It’s not charming. I am not _charmed_ right now.”

“It’s okay, Ryan,” Shane says, patting him on the shoulder, smirking when he bristles away. “I’ll be charging for mustache rides, obviously, but I’ll make sure to save you a spot at the front of the line.”

He winks and walks over to help TJ, leaving Ryan spluttering. That’s not—that wasn’t even—that wasn’t the _point_.

“Gig economy’s rough out there!” he says at Shane’s retreating back, but it’s too late to have the last word.

In Ryan’s opinion revenge is a dish best served tepid, and he serves his up a few hours later. They haven’t included it in the show, but the owners of Moon River Brewing are onsite overseeing the filming and they keep sending over beer, so Ryan’s feeling pleasantly tipsy by the time he’s sitting at the top of an old staircase and asking a ghost to push him down it.

He stands, to give the ghost better leverage for shoving and general mayhem, and looks down at Shane seated on the landing below. Shane stares up at him—or rather the _mustache_ stares up at him, goading him.

Ryan contemplates waiting until Shane’s asleep tonight and just shaving it off.

“Ryan, yell ‘Show me the money!’ Shane says, and Ryan does even though it pains him to give Shane the satisfaction. Then he gives it an extra “C’mon!” for emphasis, and a little hip wiggle, and the little hip wiggle turns into a lot of hip wiggle.

Then before he knows it, before he means to, he’s Magic Mike-ing it on the stairs for the ghost—but really for _Shane_ —and Shane’s laughing quietly to hide his genuine discomfort, rubbing at his mouth with his fingers. TJ lets out a totally silent guffaw into his elbow and shoots him a thumbs-up.

They may not catch any ghouls at Moon River Brewing Company, but he’s managed to catch Shane genuinely off-balance, and that’s almost as satisfying.

Ryan’s not sure if he’s imagining it, but he thinks Shane gives him a slightly wider berth after that. He’d meant to tease, to grab for the upper hand, but the whole thing’s backfired like Ryan’s bits so often do. Because now all he can think about is dancing, and Shane, and the press of Shane’s thumb at his neck, and Shane’s back soaked with sweat, and _Shane_.

*

“I’m sorry if my extremely sexy moves triggered you,” Ryan says later that night, back at the hotel. It’s dumb to veer back into that dangerous territory, but he’s still a little tipsy and it’s like a sore muscle; he has to test it to make sure it still aches.

“It didn’t trigger me, Ryan, it was just stupid.”

Ryan narrows his eyes, trying to plug his phone in to charge. He misses the opening in his phone about four times and has to pull back and steady his hands before he gets it right.

“Was it, dude? Was it _stupid_? You looked like you were having flashbacks to ‘Nam.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Shane asks. “I mean, you’re always weird, but as soon as we take you on the road you go bugfuck nuts.”

“It’s the mustache,” Ryan says, gesturing at his own bare upper lip.

“That’s it, I’m shaving it first thing tomorrow.  I don’t care for how sassy it’s made you.”

They crawl into their respective beds, Ryan scattering overstuffed pillows everywhere. Shane clicks the TV on and starts idly flipping through channels until he lands on something he likes.

“Perfect.”

It’s thirty minutes into a late-night showing of Jurassic Park on AMC. It’s one of Ryan’s favorites, and he nestles up against the pillow to watch. He tries to stay awake, but his eyelids are heavy even as Laura Dern’s telling Jeff Goldblum that women will inherit the earth. Before the T-Rex attacks, he’s asleep.

The last thing he hears is Shane hissing “Turn the light off!” at the kids in the car, as Sam Neill’s Alan Grant does.

*

_Well, fuck._

That’s the first thing Ryan thinks when he surveys the landscape of his dream—because he thought he’d put this behind him, this whatever-it-is. He’s really been enjoying the uninterrupted weeks of completely normal REM cycles since Ohio. He still has weird dreams, sure, but they’re _normal_ weird and don’t heavily feature his best friend in a series of escalating sexually-tinged scenarios.

He recognizes the place right away, of course.  Knott’s Berry Farm _. America’s 1 st theme park!_ The sign out front brags. 

The park’s totally empty, as far as he can tell. There are no employees taking tickets at the turnstiles, so he walks right in. There’s nobody running any of the rides, but all of the rides are running—he can hop on to any one he wants, ride it over and over, no lines, no waits. He does want to do that, but he knows the drill by now. Shane’s waiting for him here, somewhere. Either he has to find Shane, or Shane will find him.

They were just here a week ago filming the Boysenberry Festival video. It was one of Ryan’s perfect days: fun, great food, good company. It’s not so surprising that he should be back here now, except that Ryan’s subconscious rarely grants him that sort of uncomplicated pleasure.

Maybe it won’t be uncomplicated. It hasn’t escaped his notice that he’s wearing all black: black jeans, a black button-down with more buttons undone than he’d usually rock. Black leather jacket. Glasses, no contacts. It’s not a bad look, exactly, but it’s not _his_ look, and that makes him nervous.

He finds Shane next to the Timber Mountain Log Ride, as he suspected he might: it’s one of their favorite rides here. Shane is leaning against the sign, his long, long legs and his arms crossed like he’s gotten bored waiting for Ryan to show up. He’s wearing his dumb dad-at-an-amusement-park hat and shades, but also a pair of khakis and a blue denim button-down that looks like it’s back in style after having recently been very out of style.

Shane looks Ryan up and down, slowly, in a way that makes Ryan’s face burn. He’s feeling self-conscious in the leather, and he shifts his weight back and forth uncertainly under Shane’s eyes.

“Sure, okay,” Shane says, pressing a hand to his temple, resigned. And then, with a grudging admiration: “I’m digging the Jeff Goldblum cosplay.”

“Oh,” Ryan says. “Well, that makes sense, I fell asleep watching Jurassic Park, so—”

Shane’s brow furrows.

“Yeah, but more to the point, _I_ fell—” and then he stops himself abruptly, cocking his head to the side, considering. _You’re almost there, buddy. Come on._

“The leather’s hot,” Ryan says, sort of nonsensically. He’s having trouble thinking straight. He’s not sure where this dream is going. He’s not sure why his brain is forcing him into a succession of dumb costumes instead of letting him navigate this existential crisis in regular clothing. He’s not sure how to share his suspicions with Shane, who, for such a smart person, is showing every sign of being shockingly obtuse about this one thing in particular.

“ _Yeah_ it is,” Shane says. “I mean. It does look hot. Warm. Uh. It looks warm.”

Shane shakes his head back and forth with gusto, as he’s got water in his ears and it’s messing with his equilibrium.

“I don’t know why my brain is doing this to me,” Shane says, low, to himself. “Why? Why the leather? I can’t, I’m not equipped. I’m only one human.”

Ryan gets the sense that Shane is no longer talking to him but rather is bargaining with some higher power, so he pretends not to hear. It’s only polite.

“Let’s go on the ride,” Ryan says. Up the way he can see a large sign that reads “MUSTACHE RIDES, $5” in neon blinking letters, and he’d very much like to distract Shane before he spots it too.  It would probably not improve Shane’s mood.

They go on the ride. There’s nobody there to start it, but it starts when they sit down and buckle in anyway, through the power of intention: dream magic. They ride it straight through five times in a row, and when they get off they’re damp and windblown and laughing, they’re _them_ again.

Shane’s hat is tipped at a rakish angle, forced nearly off his head by the velocity of the ride, and Ryan reaches out to straighten it without a second thought. The instant his hand brushes against the softness of Shane’s hair, he feels it. Hears it.  

_Thud_.

Ryan and Shane pause, looking curiously down at the ground underfoot. Four seconds, five, ten.

**Thud.** Stronger. Or perhaps, Ryan thinks as his heart sinks into his stomach, _closer_. The water of the log flume laps up in little waves, rippling and dispersing and rippling again.

“Earthquake?” Shane suggests, but Ryan knows better, and by now Shane really should too. That’s not how Ryan’s dreams work, how his brain works. It’s going to be some weird shit for sure. He has a sneaking suspicion that his own oversize chickens have come home to roost.

“Dude,” he starts.

**THUD**.  The shake is so strong that it almost knocks Ryan off-balance. Shane reaches out an arm, whip-fast, to wrap a steadying hand at Ryan’s bicep.

“I think that’s an impact tremor,” Ryan finishes, as nonchalant as he can manage. He can hear the quaver in his own voice and he’s a little embarrassed by how quickly he’s become afraid. “From a, you know.” He gestures at his own outfit, and at Shane’s. He’s fairly alarmed here.

“Hold onto your butts,” Shane says. He flashes a wry, crooked half-smile at Ryan, his hand still clenched around Ryan’s arm, and Ryan’s heart _leaps_ in spite of his fear, and then—they hear the roar. It’s impossibly loud, it sounds impossibly close. _Impossible_.

They run.

*

“We have a T-Rex! Spared no expense!”

Shane’s murmured British accent isn’t half bad considering the circumstances, all bluster and elongated vowels. Very Attenborough.

They’re crammed into a tiny utility shed near one of the main concessions areas. Packed into it, really, like sardines. It had looked a lot bigger from the outside, not that they’re in the position to be particular with an a _ctual dinosaur_ on their heels, but it’s really just a dark closet barely big enough for a couple of brooms and a mop.

Ryan’s pressed right up against Shane, face level with his shoulder. He can feel Shane’s hipbone, pointy and pronounced, digging into his stomach, and Shane’s arms—too long to just hang there—are wrapped loosely around him. Skinny motherfucker.

“Please stop quoting Jurassic Park at me, dude,” Ryan says in a low hiss. “I’ve seen it more than you.”

He wiggles a little, trying to make himself more comfortable, trying to evade the hipbone. Shane’s breath hitches in his throat, a skip and stutter and then a long exhale.

“Can you—can you not do that?” Shane asks, very calmly, as if they’re not about to be a dinosaur’s late-afternoon snack.

“I’m sorry, I’m just not comfortable.” He wiggles a little more, and Shane’s hands tighten on his sides in an attempt to hold him still.

“I’m not _comfortable_ either. There’s an enormous carnivorous bird-lizard from the late Cretaceous outside,” Shane says through gritted teeth. “But if you could stop writhing around like a fucking eel that would be great, because you’re not improving the situation.”

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan snaps, more on reflex than anything else. He wriggles again, vigorously, just to prove that he won’t be told what to do, but he stops when Shane stifles a weird low groan. Ryan’s about to ask if Shane’s okay, if he pulled a muscle during their sprint, when he feels _the_ _situation_ pressing against his waist.

“Oh Jesus,” Ryan says, and Shane sighs the sigh of a man who knows he’s been beaten. “Are you…? Please tell me you don’t have a boner right now.”

“I always knew this would come out sooner or later,” Shane says ruefully. “Secrets don’t stay secret forever.”

“Wait, what?” 

Ryan’s losing the thread of this conversation. He’s having trouble focusing on anything other than the immediate threat of death outside this little shed, and Shane’s hard-on pressing against him _inside_ of it. Those two things are more than enough to make his brain spin out into useless little whirls, kicking up dirt in his disorderly mind. He can’t decide if he’s terrified or turned on, so his body and his brain settle for vacillating wildly between the two options.

“I’m afraid you’ve discovered my dinosaur fetish,” Shane deadpans, right in Ryan’s ear, his breath hot on Ryan’s neck and cheek. “Imagining the feel of feathers and scales against my skin just does it for me. I’m sorry you had to be here to witness this.”

Ryan both wishes he could see Shane’s face and is desperately glad he can’t. Something in Shane’s voice makes him want to shift his weight again, lean in, rub up against the nearest Shane-shaped surface, but he wills himself to stay still. _Its vision is based on movement._

“Not sure ‘witness’ is strong enough to describe whatever’s going on here, man,” Ryan says, and Shane snickers into his hair.

“No,” Shane agrees. “You’re being held captive by my boner. This is devolving into a Chuck Tingle story. Pounded in the Butt by My Repressed Feelings for My Best Friend, and Also Dinosaurs Are There for Some Reason.”

Ryan presses his eyes closed, weighing his options. He kind of wants to take his chances with the T-Rex. He can still hear it moving around outside the shed, close but not too close, investigating its surroundings with loud snuffling sounds for signs of life. Every time it takes a step, the earth quakes under them and sends the various cleaning supplies rattling around their feet.

How bad could it be, really, to be eaten? It’d probably be over quickly. He might not even feel it.

“You seem awfully calm about all of this,” Ryan says, and Shane’s arms move against his sides as he shrugs. Shane’s always calm when terrifying things are happening, and everything happening right now is _terrifying_. He wonders, not for the first time, if Shane knows exactly what’s going on here and he’s just trying to maintain plausible deniability.

“Well, it’s not really happening, is it?” Shane says. “The dinosaur’s not real. The boner’s not real. Or, well, probably the boner’s real, but _you’re_ not.” As if to emphasize how little any of this matters, he runs his hands up and down Ryan’s sides like he never would in real life. Then he grinds very lightly but with clear intention into Ryan.

“Of course I’m real,” Ryan says. Now, exactly now, would be the ideal time for him wake up, so he can jerk off in the shower and pretend this never happened. Again.

“I’ll wake up sweaty and ashamed and you’ll never be the wiser,” Shane says, ignoring him, like he’s talking himself into something, “So what’s the harm?”

Then he’s pulling Ryan against him, nudging a leg between Ryan’s thighs to press against what Ryan realizes belatedly is his own erection, guiding him where Shane wants him with a firm press of strong fingers against his rib cage. Ryan understand that this is a punishment, a reprimand: whatever is running this dream—and it sure as shit isn’t him—is unsatisfied. Is throwing something at him that he can’t ignore.                                                                      

“ _You’ll_ wake up,” Ryan repeats. “Shane, hang on, that’s not—come on, man, how do you not—”

“I’m just giving you the business, like you asked me to,” Shane murmurs into his ear, and then he’s reaching a hand down to palm at Ryan’s dick through his way-too-tight jeans. It feels amazing, just genuinely fucking fantastic, and for a moment Ryan considers tabling his growing panic and guilt and rolling with it.

This is the moment, though. He has to say something, or he’ll have let Shane trip unknowingly across a line that they can’t come back from. He can’t allow Shane to keep touching him, not when he doesn’t _understand_. What Shane would choose in the privacy of his own dream is not necessarily what he would choose if he knew the terms.

“I’m not sure you want to be doing this,” Ryan says, but he groans when Shane’s long fingers slide ever so slightly up to find the button at the fly of his jeans. “I might possess some information that you should— _ah_ , shit.”  

“It’s definitely what my brain thinks I want, and who am I to disagree?” Shane asks. _Wrong, wrong, wrong_ , Ryan thinks. But also, _yes_. Ruining this for himself is turning out to be surprisingly difficult.

Shane slides the zipper of Ryan’s jeans down excruciatingly slowly. Every catch of the zip on its way down echoes in the tiny space.

“I’m sick and tired of overanalyzing this shit,” Shane goes on. “They’re just dreams. I bought a book about dream interpretation on Amazon, do you know how stupid that makes me feel?”

“Shane—”

“I don’t know why my brain wants this so badly, maybe just because I have to look at your cheekbones all the time, but I might as well fucking do it and then maybe I can stop _fucking_ thinking about it all the time.”

“Shane!”

“What is it, Ryan? Jesus Christ,” Shane snaps. His hand is all the way down Ryan’s pants now, stroking Ryan’s dick through his boxer-briefs, fingertips sneaking perilously close to the pocket at the front. Ryan _could_ , he could just shut up. He could let Shane get him off like this, it would be so easy, it would be so good.

It would be unfair.

“This isn’t your dream, idiot, this is my dream. Our dream, maybe, I don’t. I don’t know. But I will remember every single second of this in _vivid_ detail when we wake up, so you need to think really hard about whether this is gonna be your move.”

Shane’s hand stills on Ryan’s dick, which is both a palpable relief and also the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone in the history of the world. Ryan forces himself not to buck up into Shane’s hand, to let him have this choice.   

“No,” Shane says slowly, pulling back to squint at Ryan in the dark. Ryan can just see the whites of his eyes through the bit of light coming in under the door. “No, what the fuck are you talking about? This is my dream.  I’ve been. It’s been happening recently, this weird lucid dreaming, I don’t know why.”

“These aren’t normal dreams,” Ryan starts. “I should have told you back in Ohio. We’re—”

And then there’s a roar, too close. The ground shakes like it’s going to split under them, and the walls of the shed rattle. Ryan knows he made the right call, but _something_ thinks he made the wrong one.

Shane has just enough time to gingerly withdraw his hand from Ryan’s pants, and Ryan has just enough time to think, _well, this isn’t great_ , and then the T-Rex is bashing through the wall of their little shed. Unthinking, Ryan dives down as the debris falls, makes himself as small as possible, but Shane doesn’t move as fast. He freezes.

Confronted by the reality of the massive animal in front of him, confused by the tenuous nature of the dream they’re stuck in together, Shane just stands there trembling in his stupid hat. Ryan reaches out, very slowly, to wrap his fingers around Shane’s bony ankle, the only part of him that Ryan can reach without risking a bigger movement. They all pause for a very long moment, men and beast, considering their situation. _This is in your head,_ Ryan thinks, willing it to be true, but it sure feels real.

Then the Rex lifts its leg, kicks out with impossible force, and hits Shane square in the chest with an enormous clawed foot.

Shane’s body, limp and lifeless, goes flying, and Ryan’s hand clenches around nothing but air. He wakes himself up screaming.

*

Ryan wakes up twisted in his sheets, and for a moment he just lies there, letting himself be trapped, while he remembers where and when he is: a hotel in Savannah, not Knott’s Berry Farm, and a solid sixty million years removed from a dinosaur encounter.

Then he hears a strangled moan, and when he detangles himself enough to look over at Shane’s bed, he realizes Shane is thrashing around like a wounded animal in a trap. And— _oh God, oh Jesus, please, no_ —there’s a red stain spreading fast on his white sheets.

Ryan’s up like a shot, trailing his own sheet behind him, running over to Shane’s bed, flipping on the bedside lamp. There’s blood _everywhere_ , Shane’s shirt and boxers and bedding are soaked with it, but Ryan can’t tell where it’s coming from while he’s moving so much.

“Shane, wake up!” he shouts in Shane’s ear, shaking him. For a minute he’s afraid Shane won’t come out of it, that he’s already gone, gone to wherever people go when they die in a magical dream, but then Shane’s gasping awake, eyes wide on Ryan with unseeing fear and pain.

“Oh thank fuck,” Ryan breathes, and then, “Stop moving. Stay still.”

Ryan pulls Shane’s shirt off, desperate to locate and staunch the bleeding, and then he pulls back in shock because there’s no wound there. There’s loads of blood, but no source: only a long, faded scar running diagonal across Shane’s chest.

Ryan’s seen Shane shirtless loads of times. He could pull up a picture of Shane shirtless on Google right now, if he wanted to, and he’s absolutely one thousand percent certain that Shane’s chest is—or, well, _was_ —unscarred.

He does a quick check over the rest of Shane’s body, speedy, all business, looking for the source of the bleeding. When he finds nothing, he reaches out to touch the scar on Shane’s chest, which runs all the way from the left side of Shane’s rib cage to just below his opposite clavicle. It looks like it’s been healing for years, has already healed completely.

Shane’s hand reaches up to trace his fingers slowly over the raised area on his skin. His fingers meet Ryan’s on his chest and then fall away. Ryan pulls his hand back too, and helps Shane drag himself into an upright sitting position in the bed.

“Why are you covered in blood?” Ryan asks out loud, even though he doesn’t really expect Shane to explain the logistics of this any more than he can.

“We,” Shane croaks. “Why are _we_ covered in blood?”

“I’m covered in blood because I had to make sure you weren’t dying. But that’s not—where did it come from? How does it exist?”

Shane doesn’t answer. He just shakes his head.

“Dreams aren’t—dreams aren’t real, Ryan. They’re _not real_.”

“This blood is real, Shane. It came from somewhere.”

“Maybe I—I must’ve had a nosebleed in my sleep.”

“Then why is the blood on your sheets and clothes, and not on your pillow by your nose? Come on, dude.”

Shane shrugs. He’s got that stubborn look on his face, the one Ryan recognizes from years of infuriating arguments. The one that says he’s going to dig his heels in and refuse to accept things that are happening right in front of him.

Ryan can live with that face when it’s just weird noises and the spirit box and other petty bullshit, but this is going to stretch the limits of his tolerance.

“What about the scar, man? You and I both know this wasn’t there yesterday.”

Shane’s hand flies again to his chest, as if he can cover the scar with his hand, can make it disappear back into nonexistence by hiding it from Ryan’s sight.

Ryan takes a deep breath, and then he goes for broke. He should have forced this conversation back in Ohio, the minute he knew something was wrong. He shouldn’t have mistaken breaking the news in a dream for the easy way out.

There’s literal blood on his hands.

“I was there,” Ryan starts. He doesn’t quite know how to put it because he doesn’t know what he’s dealing with here, or how much Shane remembers. In the end he just says it, all in a rush. “I was at Knott’s just now, with you. I think we were—I think we were dreaming together, somehow, like a shared dream. And I’m sure it’s happened before. I don’t know how, or why, but.”

He lets himself trail off and chances a look at Shane. Shane’s just staring blankly at him, bloody hand still clasped over the mark on his bare chest. _Why isn’t he saying anything?_

“I’m sorry,” Ryan says, gesturing at the blood, at Shane. “This is my fault.”

Then Shane smiles, a weird, nervous grin that doesn’t make his eyes crinkle.

“Ryan, that’s not possible. You know that, right? That is—that is less possible than ghosts, even, which are already about as not-possible as an impossible thing can be.”

“Are you denying that you just had a dream where you put your hand on my dick and then got murked by a dinosaur?” Ryan asks, unable to keep the irritation and disbelief out of his voice. He had been planning to ignore that first thing for now, since this conversation is big enough already, but that was before Shane whipped out his condescending _Ryan’s-an-idiot_ voice.

Shane’s ears go pink, but he shakes his head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. I think you’re confused. It was just a nosebleed.”

Ryan rears back. Shane’s denial—about this impossible thing that is nonetheless true, happening right in front of their faces—is worse than a punch to the gut.  Deep down he’s always believed Shane’s protestations that if ever confronted with clear physical evidence, the real thing, he’ll admit defeat. But here he is, an _actual_ scar on his body, covered in _actual_ blood, Ryan telling him things Ryan shouldn’t know, and Shane’s as impenetrable as ever.

“Are you fucking with me right now?” Ryan asks. His stomach churns as the fear and guilt start to fade and the fury rolls in to take their place. “You could have. I thought you _died_.”

“I think you’re just keyed up from the travel,” Shane says, measured, like he’s negotiating with a guy who’s got a bomb strapped to his chest. “You’re tired, and you’re freaked out by the places we go, and maybe you have a weird dream or two and then you get—” and he _pauses_ , because he knows better, Ryan knows he does— “irrational.”

That word, irrational, is the last straw. Ryan can’t be here. He can’t just sit here and listen to Shane tell him that the things he knows to be true aren’t true. He gets up from the bed, goes into the bathroom to wash off his hands and arms as best he can, shucking his bloody t-shirt as he goes.

“What are you doing? Ryan, please, don’t—” 

“Fuck you, dude,” Ryan says, pulling a fresh shirt over his head. “I’m not being irrational, and the worst part is that you _know it_. I don’t know if you get off on this gaslighting bullshit or what, but I’d rather go camp out on a couch in the lobby than stay here and listen to you lie through your fucking teeth.”

Shane looks awfully pale and waxen in the terrible lamplight. It might be from blood loss, or shock, but in this moment a surprisingly large part of Ryan doesn’t really care. He doesn’t have the words for how sick he is of this shit.

“Let’s just go back to bed,” Shane says, “and talk about this in the morning. It’ll probably seem pretty silly when we’re fully awake and it’s light out.”

“You do whatever you want,” Ryan says, grabbing his wallet and his room key, shoving them in his jeans pocket. “Try not to fall asleep. Or if you do, try not to die.”

As Ryan goes, he slams the door. It’s a little childish, maybe, but he can’t help himself.

*

They’ve got one more day and night of shooting in Savannah, and every second of it is terrible. They more or less manage to turn it on for the cameras like nothing is wrong, and Ryan thinks they do an okay job, but once the cameras are off they won’t look each other in the eye.   
  
Ryan’s head is spinning with how much he wants Shane, and how much he wants to kick Shane in the teeth. Rip that _fucking_ mustache off his face with his bare hands, hair by hair, and then kiss him stupid until he understands.

That night Ryan knocks on TJ’s door, tells him Shane’s snoring too much to let him sleep and asks to crash there. The raise of TJ’s eyebrows says he doesn’t believe Ryan for a second, but he holds the door open anyway.

“Whatever you’re doing,” TJ says, “or _not_ doing, cut it out. You’re going to ruin this.”

“Tell him that,” Ryan says, pushing in, throwing himself on the bed.

“I did,” TJ says, and he turns out the light.

*

Back in L.A., Ryan does the only thing he can think to do: he starts assembling a dossier of research. Of evidence. He goes through their footage from Ohio, and the new stuff from Savannah. He makes lists. He writes down everything he can remember, every weird dream, every coincidence. He builds his case.

A week later—one week of stony silences, one week of awkward mumbled “excuse me”s by the coffee machine back at the office, one week of coworkers exchanging meaningful glances in his presence like they’re all thinking the same thing but won’t say it to his face—Ryan sends Shane an Outlook invitation.   
__  
Subject: let’s get into it  
Location: shane’s shitty apartment  
Fri 4/13/2018     8:00 pm PDT  
Event details:  don’t even try to get out of this, it’s happening. if you don’t accept this invite i’ll murder you

Ryan gets up to go to the bathroom, and when he gets back there’s a message in his inbox:

_Accepted: Invitation: let’s get into it @ Fri April 13, 2018  8 pm (PDT)_

He risks a glance over at Shane, who’s got his headphones on and seems to be industriously working. As if he can sense Ryan’s eyes on him, Shane looks over. His hand flies up, as if by some unconscious instinct, to rub at his upper chest, where Ryan knows the scar must be. Then he just shrugs, an expression on his face that Ryan can’t read.

Enough’s enough.


	5. Diplomatic Relations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our boys start to get into the theories, apologies are given, nobody alters the outcome of the American Revolution, and Chekhov's alarm clock makes an appearance. 
> 
> Recommended watching: the Ruining History episode ["Was Ben Franklin in a Sex Cult?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix3JApnAF4w)
> 
> As of now this fic is explicit. Happy Friday the 13th, everybody, and happy triumphant return of Buzzfeed Unsolved True Crime!

At eight o’clock on the dot on Friday night, Ryan barrels into Shane’s apartment without so much as knocking. He’s got a duffel bag over one shoulder, his pillow tucked under the other armpit, and a look on his face like he’s going to storm the barricades.

“I wasn’t informed that this was a sleepover,” Shane says. “I’ve really got to be better about locking that door.”

“We’re going to run an experiment, Mr. Science Douchebag.”

Ryan dumps the duffel bag on Shane’s couch and starts rummaging through it, pulling things out and setting them on his coffee table. His laptop. His phone. A length—Shane’s stomach lurches with recognition—of black satin ribbon. A bloody shirt.

Shane had really hoped that the intervening week would have cooled Ryan off, but the way he whips the shirt out of the bag and tosses it onto the table says Ryan’s still spitting mad.  

“What is all of this?” Shane asks, pulling two beers out of his fridge for himself and Ryan. If this conversation goes anything like the last one, they’re going to need them.

“What do you think, dumbass? Evidence.”

Shane is not a man with a lot of regrets, and that’s by design. He lives a careful life. Maybe not all that thrilling as a general rule, but calibrated to keep him chugging along, reasonably happy and healthy. But boy, when he gets it wrong he gets it _all the way_ wrong.

When he looks at Ryan now, his mouth a grim line, his eyes red from lack of sleep or worse, it’s regrets all the way down.

He regrets being so dismissive with Ryan in Savannah. He regrets the lies he’s told in the interest of preserving their status quo. He regrets how he’s spent an entire week mulling over all possible logical explanations for what happened that night and he’s forced to admit that none of them are good enough.

He can explain away the glitter, and even the blood, but the undeniable fact that he went to sleep unblemished and woke up with a scar on his chest simply can’t be explained away. God knows he’s tried, and his brain’s too exhausted from running itself in circles to do it anymore.

Shane’s a big believer in Occam’s razor, that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. It’s just not usual that the tidiest explanation also happens to be _batshit crazy_.

“How do you want this?” Ryan asks.

“Pardon?” Shane asks, raising his eyebrows. He hands Ryan a beer and Ryan guzzles most of the bottle in one go, muscles of his throat working as he chugs it down. It’s hard to look at. Shane wishes he could just temporarily forget Ryan has a body, that they could both just reduce themselves to two brains in jars, so he can get through this with dignity intact. 

“I prepared it in narrative form if you don’t want to talk about it,” Ryan says. “Or if we start yelling again and I can’t look at your stupid face any more.”

“In narrative…you wrote a script for this?”

“Yeah, I—shut up.”

“Just talk me through your du—your thing, Ryan. We can be adults about this.”

“Oh, _now_ you wanna be an adult,” Ryan says, but he picks up the ribbon and passes it over to Shane. “Exhibit A,” he says. “One piece of black ribbon. Do you remember the night we filmed the Mothman ep?”

“Yeah, of course,” Shane says. Something tickles at his memory, like a feather running along the base of his skull. He tastes chocolate in his mouth, velvety and rich and warm.

“I told you I found this in my jeans pocket, but that wasn’t true. When I woke up the next morning it was in my hand, and I didn’t have it when I went to sleep.  I don’t remember, but I think I dreamed about it, and then when I woke up it was _real_. I think that’s when it started.”

Shane lets the ribbon slip through his fingers. He winds it around his thumb. When he looks back up, Ryan’s watching his hand.

“I had a weird dream that night too,” Shane admits. “I don’t remember it, I just remember waking up and feeling funny. I thought it was the pot. I _still_ think it was the pot.”

“Exhibit B,” Ryan says, queuing up a video on his laptop. “The next night, at the Bellaire House. I had a dream, a recurring dream that I have—that I used to have—kind of a lot. Only it ended differently.”

“Was I in it?” Shane has a sinking feeling.

“Yeah, but you’re usually in it,” Ryan says, a hint of a flush on his cheeks that might just be from the beer he slammed. “I wind up back to the Sallie House and the fucking demon tears you apart. Only this time we got in—we, um, hid from it and it didn’t get us.”

“Okay, so?” It rings a bell; probably Ryan’s just told him about those dreams before. But also: stark white filmy curtains fluttering in a dark room, a sharp clavicle under his hand. A mean-spirited hiss in his ear, _if you step out on that limb it will break from under you. Think of what you stand to lose._

“So the next morning you woke up shirtless and didn’t remember taking off your shirt. Remember that?”

“Yeah, but—I got hot in the night, Ryan. It happens.”

Ryan hits play on the video. It’s the footage from the camera they set up in the Bellaire House to watch them sleep. Ryan’s set it to fast forward through the whole night, and Shane watches it play through. He frowns, because he sees immediately what Ryan’s getting at.

“Play it again.”

Ryan plays it again. As it plays through the second time, Ryan sits back on the couch and watches Shane very closely, arms crossed over his chest.

“So how’d your shirt get from on your body to folded on that table, dude?” Ryan asks the question that Shane’s thinking, because it’s true: Shane doesn’t get up once during the night. He simply falls asleep wearing his shirt and wakes up without it. Burrowed down in his sleeping bag as he is, it’s impossible to pinpoint the moment when a change might have happened.

“This was all the footage?” Shane asks. He doesn’t mean to suggest that Ryan might have doctored something, but. _But_.

“Don’t you dare, asshole. I didn’t cut anything out, I just sped it up. This was everything. When I saw it I almost shit my pants.”

“Did I,” Shane starts, and then halts abruptly. He takes another swig of his beer, as casual as he can manage, and gives it another go. “In the dream, did I take my shirt off?”

“Yep,” Ryan says. He doesn’t offer up any more detail than that, and Shane doesn’t ask for it.

“Okay.”  

“ _Okay_? That’s all you have to say?” Ryan’s tearing at the label on his beer bottle, peeling it off in damp strips.  

“What else do you want me to say? I’m not blind, it’s fucked up. Show me the rest of your stuff.”

Ryan picks up his phone, and he scrolls for a little bit.  Then he holds it out to Shane, and there’s a photo on the screen.

“Exhibit C,” he says. It’s a selfie of Ryan from the collarbones up, in the bright artificial light of a hotel bathroom. He’s got his head tilted back— _way back_ , Shane notices, swallowing hard—and there’s a bright neon green handprint across his neck, stark and possessive against his Adam’s apple.

“Rave gone wrong?” Shane asks, but he already knows. He _knows_. God damn it.  

“The third night, in Mansfield. I dreamed about that dancing mania thing, the one you talk about whenever you want to use mass hysteria to explain something away. It got, hmm. I woke up with that on my neck.”

“Glitter,” Shane says, remembering.

The defensive hunch of Ryan’s shoulders unfurls, just a degree. “Glitter,” he agrees.

There’s a long silence while Shane finishes his beer and Ryan finishes tearing the beer bottle label into many tiny pieces strewn across Shane’s coffee table.

“You should text me that picture,” Shane says, because it’s becoming evident that whatever battle is happening here, he’s been losing it the whole time. So much for dignity. “I might need to consult it again. For, for evidence purposes.”

“Sure,” Ryan says, like that’s a perfectly normal thing to request, which is kinder than Shane deserves. Then he holds up the t-shirt. “Exhibit D.”

It’s the one Ryan had been wearing that night in Savannah when Shane had—when _something_ had happened. He doesn’t think it’s correct to say he almost died, despite all the blood, but he’d woken up changed.

Shane had thrown his own bloodied sleep shirt away in the hotel trash can because he couldn’t bear to look at it again. The thought of Ryan smuggling a biohazard through airport security, in the hopes that it might one day make the difference between Shane _believing_ and not, makes him ashamed all over again.

“And Exhibit E,” Ryan says, pointing at Shane. At Shane’s chest, where the scar sits still, under the shirt. “I assume it’s still there?”

“I think it’s a permanent fixture.”

“Sucks,” Ryan says, and Shane can only toss out a one-shouldered shrug. He doesn’t care so much about the scar, except that it’s been a near-constant reminder of his own negligence and casual cruelty. It’s not about the scar: it’s about the look on Ryan’s face, like he’d been slapped, when Shane had said the word _irrational_.

“Can I see it?” Ryan asks.

“Later?” Shane doesn’t know how to explain that he’s vulnerable right now and he’d really rather finish this conversation fully clothed, but Ryan seems to understand because he nods.

“Given the evidence, I think the established facts are these,” Ryan says. “One: dreams are real. Or at least _these_ dreams are real enough that we bring back souvenirs. And two: we’re in them together, or having the same dream somehow. I don’t know how you could look at these things and come to any other conclusion.”

This is the point where, if Shane wanted, he could dig his heels in again. He could tell Ryan that this is ridiculous, impossible (and _it is_ , his brain is screaming, _it is both of those things!_ ). He could reject Ryan’s evidence, could reject Ryan, could protect the earthbound part of himself at all costs.

He knows that if he pulls that crap again, his friendship with Ryan is as good as over. Ryan would consider another lie, in this moment, to be a betrayal of the highest order. Shane won’t get a third chance if he wrecks his second.

Ryan’s watching him, waiting for his reaction, and Shane decides.

“I don’t understand how any of this is possible,” Shane says, “Like, rationally, scientifically, it shouldn’t be possible. But I do accept that it must be what’s happening. Somehow.”

Ryan just stares.

“I believe you,” Shane clarifies.

Ryan pinches the bridge of his nose, passes his palm over his eyes, and when he pulls his arm back Shane can see that his eyes are shiny. It feels like an invasion of privacy, sitting here watching Ryan stare at the ceiling and blink back tears.

It stings, too. It couldn’t be clearer that Ryan had come here expecting Shane to fail him, and he’d come anyway. It must have taken every ounce of courage he had. Shane would never have done it; he’d have swept it under the rug, and avoided, and made excuses.

Shane understands now that, for all his fears and anxieties, Ryan is in fact braver than him. Has _always_ been braver in the ways that matter.

“I’m _so_ , I’m so mad at you,” Ryan says. His voice is wobbly, raw with relief and vestiges of anger below that. “You couldn’t have just said that shit a week ago?”

He doesn’t know what to do—whether he should get up, go sit next to Ryan. Get him a tissue. Give him some kind of physical token of his apology, something safe, a pat on the arm or the knee. There’s a 50/50 chance that if he does one of those things Ryan will punch him in the face or actually start full-on crying.

Then again, maybe letting Ryan punch him is the right call.

“I’m sorry.” Shane holds his hands up, empty and helpless. “It’s not an excuse, but it wasn’t on purpose. This is hard for me, Ry. I needed a little time.”

He hopes the nickname will buy him a little leeway, a little softness, and Ryan’s jaw does seem to unclench almost imperceptibly.  Shane does get up then, to get them each another beer and to give Ryan a moment to wipe his eyes with the hem of his t-shirt, to school his voice and his features and get back into work mode.

“I _am_ sorry,” he says again, twisting open the beer, holding it out like a peace offering. “I’ll make it up to you. The next time the spirit box garbles out some nonsense I’ll play along, tell everybody the location just might be lightly haunted. Do that thing where I stare down a dark hallway real hard and then, when you ask me if I saw something, I’ll just shake my head like I didn’t but in a way that suggests I totally did.”

“Fuck you,” Ryan says, but his mouth twists up. Shane perceives the tension between them starting to thaw just a hair. Just enough that he thinks _we can, we can do this_.

“Tell me about this experiment, then,” he says, nodding his head at the pillow Ryan brought.

“Right. Well, it only happened in Ohio and Georgia, right? So basically, only when we’ve slept in the same room? Proximity matters.”

Shane nods.

“We need to figure out more about how this works before we can know for sure why it’s happening and how to make it stop. I want to make sure I understand the rules this thing’s playing by. The experiment I propose is this: we sleep together tonight,” Ryan says. He makes a face. “Well, uh. We sleep in the same room. And we see what happens.”

“Sounds highly scientific. So this _is_ a slumber party?” Shane asks. “I knew I should’ve made popcorn. We can braid each other’s’ hair and play MASH and spoon ourselves to sleep.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ryan says, going beet red and flustered. Shane doesn’t press, but then again he doesn’t need to.

*

In the end, though, that’s more or less what happens. No hair braiding, no spooning, but Shane makes popcorn. They put on, of all things, Planet Earth II, and Shane relishes the chance to marvel at real, solid miracles of evolution and geography instead of amorphous dream-nightmares for a while.

They put it off as long as they can, but by about 11:30 he’s yawning non-stop and Ryan’s practically asleep on the couch next to him.

“Do you want to do this here, or—bedroom?” Ryan asks when Shane shuts off the tv with a firm click of the remote. Shane considers.

Shane doesn’t want to let on how nervous he is, how uncomfortable. He’s still reeling from the discovery that his private dreams, things he would have chosen to keep for himself, are not so private after all. That some strange rip in the fabric of the universe has shown them to the very person he wants to see them the least. If he insists they sleep on the couch and the floor instead of sharing Shane’s bed, it will give his nerves away.

“Bedroom’s fine,” he says. “More comfortable.”

_Just play it cool, boy_. _Real cool._

*

So now he’s got Ryan in his bed, and that’s not weird. Not weird at all. Definitely not something he’s thought about.

Ryan turns over and Shane mimics his movement so they’re both on their sides, facing each other.

“I’ve taken precautions so we don’t have a repeat of Georgia,” Ryan says. He holds up his phone, and he’s set an alarm for two hours from now, so they don’t have a chance to get too deep in the dream. “Try not to feel me up this time, we’ve got work to do.”

Shane scowls and flops over onto his back. It was _one time_.

“Look, no promises, man,” Shane says, because this is so much safer if it’s a bit. “Dream you is just way more irresistible than real you.  Big dark doe eyes and shit. That’s not my fault.”

Ryan lets out an indignant squawk, but then he’s laughing. It’s the first time Shane’s heard him laugh in days. He hadn’t realized until right this moment that making Ryan laugh is on his own personal hierarchy of needs, below food and water and oxygen but maybe not much else.

“Victim blaming!”

Now Shane’s laughing too. They laugh themselves silly, for way longer than the bit warrants, if only because it feels so good to be on the same team again.  It’s like getting air into his lungs again, that laugh.

When the laughter dies out, Ryan asks, “Can I see it now? Would that be weird?”

Shane sits up and pulls his shirt over his head. Sure enough the scar is still there, faded enough that it looks like it’s been there for years. Ryan peers at it for a long minute and exhales heavily through his nose.

“It’s bigger than I remembered.”

“Yeah, I get that all the time.”  

Ryan snorts. “I hate you so much.  I’m turning the light off.” He flicks off the lamp on Shane’s bedside table, and they fall silent. Before too long, they fall asleep.

*

When they arrive in the dream—Shane can feel it happen, now that he’s looking for it, like a pull behind his ribcage orienting him in the space of the dream, a marionette’s string being yanked—they’re on a small boat, slipping silently through dark water.

He glances around, and this time there’s no need to go looking for Ryan because he’s right there, seated next to Shane. They’re surrounded by other people too, men wearing white pants and jackets covered in black robes. Everybody’s wearing a black mask that covers the top half of their faces, save the eyes.

That’s a little troubling, just because Shane can’t think of many good things that require masks.

The lighting isn’t great, it’s nearly sunset, but Shane can just see a beautiful white mansion rising up in the distance. He recognizes it from photographs he looked at while researching the first season of Ruining History, and he lets himself have a moment to cherish how much Ryan is going to hate what’s about to go down.

Then he leans down and whispers to Ryan, “I think that’s Medmenham Abbey,” pointing downriver toward the approaching abbey.

“Medmenham? Why do I know that name?” Ryan whispers back.

“The Ben Franklin ep of Ruining History,” Shane says, grimacing by way of an apology, and then sits back and enjoys the way Ryan’s face falls when he understands.

“God fucking damn it, Shane,” he says. “Just—god damn it. You absolute piece of shit.”

“This isn’t my fault!” Shane protests, but it’s got to be at least a little bit his fault. Somewhere deep inside his subconscious this was waiting to be unearthed by something or someone, dusted off and put on the record player and left to run.

“We live in L.A.,” Ryan says weakly. “If you wanted to go to a weird sex party we could have just stayed home.”

*

The knowledge that this dream is at least some shade of real and that Ryan’s there with him—not just the _shape_ of Ryan but his actual conscious mind—is sucking some of the fun out of the whole ye olde orgy business. Shane imagines that if they were going into this blissfully ignorant, it would probably have been a pretty stellar dream.

As it is, Ryan is radiating nervous energy from the minute they disembark the boat with the other men. He trips clambering from the boat to the dock, and Shane has to reach out a steadying hand so he doesn’t pitch ass over elbows into the Thames.

“Chill out, dude,” Shane says. “Weren’t you in a frat in college? This can’t be that different.”

“My frat did not host pagan rituals _or_ orgies, Shane.”

“A kegger by any other name…”

The group winds their way up a little stone path from the dock to the Abbey, which really is just a beautiful Gothic revival home with some stray religious iconography here and there for flavor. There are ruins some way away from the main building that Shane assumes must be the remnants of some of the old Cistercian buildings, destroyed during the Reformation, and the history geek part of him itches to go off exploring.

“I do think this is your fault, though,” Ryan says as they walk. “I don’t know enough of the history to set this up properly.” He juts his chin up at a little plaque above the archway they’ve just entered, welcoming them into the building proper. It reads _Fais ce que tu voudras._

“French,” Shane says.

“For what? ‘Wrap it before you tap it’?”

Shane tries to remember his research.

“I’m pretty sure it means ‘Do what thou wilt. _’”_

Ryan snickers.

“Hey, do you think ol’ Big Boner Ben’s here?”

“Dunno, I can’t tell what year it is. If we see him here, don’t you fucking dare call him that to his face.  I swear, I can’t take you anywhen.”

“It’s sweet of you to assume that I’d recognize Ben Franklin if I saw him. But hey, what’s the worst that could—”

Ryan stops himself midsentence. They both know now that what happens here could reverberate in unexpected ways.

“Just try not to cause a major diplomatic incident, is all I’m saying. I don’t want to wake up in an alternate reality where we lost the Revolutionary War because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut about a founding father’s dick.”

*

The pagan ritual part of the evening is, surprisingly, pretty damn boring. Shane’s never been to an actual ritual before, and he’s got a hunch that none of these dudes have either. It’s all just a thinly-veiled excuse to dress up in silly outfits and do freaky stuff with each other and a bunch of (hopefully _very_ well-compensated) ladies of the evening.

Shane can respect that.

There’s a fire and some chanting, and a little frenetic hopping around, and extremely generous libations, which as far as Shane can tell are just for getting lit on good French wine rather than for any higher purpose. He wouldn’t have expected it would be possible to get drunk in a dream, but by the twentieth or so time someone passes a goblet around he does feel well on his way. Ryan’s swaying a little at his side.

After the ritual stuff, they all move through to a large banquet hall, where there’s food laid out on long tables. Standing behind the tables—probably physically incapable of sitting, given the width of their hoop skirts—are perhaps a dozen women, unmistakably beautiful even behind their masks, their elaborate hairstyles towering toward the ceiling.

At his side Ryan perks up a little, and Shane laughs. “I wouldn’t, unless you want to bring the clap back from a dream. _For sure_ everybody in this room but you and me has at least two untreated STDs.”

Ryan deflates, and then he grabs a goblet of wine from a passing tray. “You it is, then,” he says, and he downs the glass.

“Glad to know I’m your backup choice.” Shane snags a goblet of his own. “Feels good.”

“You know, this isn’t a bad party,” Ryan says, ignoring him. “I’m almost sorry we’re gonna wake up soon.”

Shane remembers the alarm. It’s impossible to know how dream-time correlates to real-time, but it’s been at least three or four hours here in the dream world so they must be getting close.

They hang out for a while, sampling food. Some of it’s gross, like the very gamey and possibly gone-off meat mince pie that Shane has to spit out into a napkin, but some of it isn’t bad. Ryan manages to locate a dish that’s not unlike curry.

“Tastes like imperialism,” Shane says, smacking his lips.

He notices that the crowd has thinned somewhat. People are starting to venture off to quieter parts of the house in pairs—and in _not-pairs_. Shane catches sight of two men leading a woman out of the hall, one of them guiding her through the doorway, his hand on her lower back. The two men are holding hands, so it’s safe to assume it’s _ménage a trois_ o’clock. Ryan looks around when Shane does, and realizes the same thing.

“What do we do? Should we just stay here, or…?”  He trails off, shoves a hunk of cheese in his mouth.

Shane thinks about it, eyeing the room. There are a few women left, but they’re all talking to other men. They could probably just hang out here eating their fill until the alarm wakes them without arousing suspicion. Everybody here’s got better things to be doing than hassling them anyway.

So it’s a mystery even to himself when Shane says, although he knows better than to go with this man to a second location, “I think we’d better go somewhere. You know, just so we blend in _._ When in Rome, or whatever.” 

Ryan raises his eyebrows, but he doesn’t argue. He just grabs another piece of cheese for the road and follows Shane out of the hall. They poke around for a while, until they find a nice little library deep in the east wing that’s unoccupied. It seems safe enough, since he figures most of the revelers will have gone in search of a bedroom.

Shane throws himself on a cushy settee to watch Ryan peruse the shelves. For the first time he allows himself to appreciate that whatever he and Ryan are doing here, it’s actually pretty fucking cool when it isn’t trying to murder them. Almost like time travel.

Ryan unhooks his robe and tosses it on a nearby straight-backed chair. He grabs a book off the shelf and opens it to a random page. His eyebrows go up, up, up toward his hairline and he whistles under his breath.

“The one you had us read on the video was tame in comparison to this,” he says, flipping through the book. “This is dirty!”

Shane gestures to the air, as if to say _get on with it, then_. Ryan clears his throat, gives a little self-conscious giggle, and then pulls himself together enough to read:

_“Her sturdy stallion had now unbuttoned, and produced naked, stiff and erect, that wonderful machine, which I had never seen before, and which, for the interest my own seat of pleasure began to take furiously in it, I stared at with all the eyes I had…”_

He collapses against the shelf, squeaking, “Sturdy stallion…!”

“Well Jesus, Ryan, don’t stop there. I need to know how many eyes she had. Most people just have the two, you know.”

Ryan shakes his head, still giggling too much to speak, slapping his leg. He tosses the book back on the shelf and throws himself down on the other end of the settee.

“Hey. So.”

“Hey, so?”

“I’ve noticed that in some dreams your brain seems to be more in charge than mine, and vice versa. In yours we just wear weird clothes and watch white people do white people things, and in mine one or both of us is in mortal peril. What d’you suppose that means?”

“It means I’m still really beat up about the fact that we don’t have a proper costume budget, and you’re a headcase,” Shane says, absentmindedly stroking the velvety material of the settee.

“I’m trying to pay you a compliment,” Ryan says, and then he leans back with an easy grin. Shane can see the wine’s worked on him. “As far as dates through time and space go, this one’s pretty good.”

Shane experiences something like an actual record scratch in his head.

“Date?” His voice sounds stupidly high-pitched when he says it, and he hopes Ryan doesn’t notice. Ryan peers at him intently, eyes a little unfocused, and then he steamrollers forward.

“Yeah, don’t you think that’s what this is? Like a weird interdimensional date?  Something in the universe is trying to throw us together, man.”

“What kind of something?”

“I have a theory and you’re gonna hate it,” Ryan says, and then he’s laughing again.

 “You didn’t present any evidence for that.”

“Yeah, well,” Ryan shrugs. “You looked like you were about to have a heart attack already. But in Savannah, when. When you stopped—stopped touching me, and the dream threw a fuckin’ dinosaur-shaped tantrum about it, that’s when I suspected.”

Shane should probably be concerned about this, but all he really cares about in this moment is Ryan saying _touching me_. He swallows the last of his wine and sets it on a side table. He’s little reckless, a little drunk, and a lot tired of talking.  And there’s something about wearing a mask that’s emboldening: like he should earn the mask by doing something daring.

It’s a dangerous combination.

“So if this was a date,” he says, without anything even resembling a plan, “if this was a _good_ date, what would you do about it?”

Ryan’s sprawled out against the back of the settee, lounging comfortably. He traces a little pattern on the material and watches Shane, evaluating. Shane shifts in his seat and rearranges his long legs under him.

He wonders what Ryan is seeing, what invisible and silent calculations he’s making. Whether he will decide Shane is worth the risk.

He doesn’t have to wonder long, because suddenly Ryan is sitting up, crawling across the settee to Shane, throwing a leg over Shane to straddle him and ease down onto his lap. So much of Shane’s height is in his legs that sitting pressed together like this forces them into alignment, Ryan looking Shane nearly in the eye for once.

“This, probably,” Ryan says, and then he’s winding one arm around Shane’s neck, bracing himself against the back of the settee with the other. He leans in to kiss Shane hard on the mouth, no preamble, no hesitation, just a frantic press of lips and curry powder and wine. It’s a touch awkward, in the way of a first kiss with a new person, but it’s also not awkward because it’s _Ryan_. 

_Brave_ , Shane thinks again. He gets a hand on Ryan’s waist and one on his thigh, feels the muscles there flex under his fingers.

It’s open-mouthed and a little sloppy, the desperate culmination of four months’ worth of longing and frustration. Shane doesn’t know why they come together so much easier in the dreams, but there’s something permissive about the air around them. Something urging them on when they might be held back by fear or better judgment while awake.

It’s not _not_ them. It’s just them _and_.

Above him Ryan shifts down with decisive intent, deepening the kiss, transferring the hand on Shane’s neck into his hair to find leverage in the strands and _tug_. It turns out that Ryan kisses the opposite of how he talks, of how he moves through the world: instinctively, unselfconsciously, all doing and no thinking (rethinking, overthinking). 

Shane feels like he’s found the key to unwinding Ryan; here it was the whole time, in his hands. No pharmacology required.

Ryan slides his tongue in to pass against Shane’s tongue, very gently. He sucks just a little and Shane groans a stupid, strangled groan, deep in his throat, when his dick twitches to full hardness in his pants. For a minute Shane’s embarrassed, and then he realizes, no, he _wants_ Ryan to feel it. That’s the point.

_Look, look what you’re doing to me._

He grinds up with his hips, digging his fingers into the meat of Ryan’s thighs, holding him still enough to press their dicks together through their layers of fabric. He’s hard enough to cut glass, and Ryan’s hard against him, and it’s all— _a lot_. It’s a lot. Ryan hisses into his mouth, pulls back to make a little _huh_ noise into Shane’s neck.

Shane can’t help it, he starts to laugh again.

“What?” Ryan asks. He’s rocking against Shane now with a complete lack of shame, pressing open-mouthed kisses to Shane’s jaw.

“Just, you made me _specifically promise_ not to feel you up again.”

“That was short-sighted of me,” Ryan says, and Shane can feel the smile against his throat. That’s permission if he ever heard it, and Shane lets his hand slide from Ryan’s thigh to cup him through his trousers. He wants to finish what he started a week ago, and the dream wants it too.

“Hang on,” Ryan says. “Just a—just a sec.”

“Ryan, please, not again.  I’m, I’m on board, I—”

“No, I feel like I’m making out with Zorro, man. I wanna see you.”

Ryan pulls off his own mask, tossing it away without a second glance, and then he reaches up to untie Shane’s. Shane strokes slowly, just to watch Ryan fumble with the knot. Shane’s mask joins the other on the floor and there’s finally nothing between them, no disguises or dissembling.

“I’m not sure I can figure out how to get into these pants,” Shane says, brushing at the complicated lacing at Ryan’s crotch on the upstroke.

“You’re a smart guy, I have faith in you,” Ryan says, and Shane rubs harder, finding the head of Ryan’s dick through the fabric and thumbing at it. “Jesus, just fucking, just yank. It’s not like they’re my real pants.”

Shane does, he yanks at the lacings until he’s able to shove his hand through. When he closes his hand around Ryan, Ryan convulses involuntarily into him, shuddering a full-body shudder. _I am, I’m going to make it up to you_ , Shane thinks. _I’m sorry I said I didn’t believe you. I believe you._

“Say that again.”

“Wh—oh.” Shane hadn’t realized he’d said that out loud.  Or maybe he didn’t; maybe the dream is giving Ryan what he needs, without his permission. “I believe you.”

“God,” Ryan chokes out. “Oh, I’m, wow, close already.”

Shane hears a beeping, quiet to start, in the back of his head. Just a buzzing in his ear at first, and then louder, more insistent.

“Are you gonna come?” Shane asks, stroking more firmly, inartful but determined, a race against the clock. Lets his thumb run over the slit and down to form a tight circle with his ring and middle finger that Ryan can fuck up into.

“God damn it,” Ryan curses, pushing up into Shane’s hand with a groan even as he cocks his head to the side, hearing what Shane’s hearing. “Oh, oh no, _oh_ , fuck, I’m—”

“Is that the—” Shane starts to say, but he doesn’t get a chance to finish it.

*

Shane’s first impression upon waking, before he even opens his eyes, is, _I’m suffocating_. There’s a weight on his stomach and chest and he can’t breathe easily. His second impression is, _I’m so hard._

His third is: _I’m fucked_.

Ryan’s groan is echoing in his ears, and he thinks it’s a memory until the pressure on him shifts and he realizes it’s actual Ryan on top of him, shuddering himself awake, still unconsciously pressing down onto Shane. Hips moving in frantic stutters even as he’s fumbling for his phone to turn the alarm off.

There’s a dampness between them, and Shane’s slow, sleep-addled brain eventually registers that Ryan must have come, must have _been_ coming as the alarm went off and ripped them from their dream. He’s still coming down from it, breathing heavily into Shane’s chest, little aftershock tremors racking through him.

Shane doesn’t know what to do, what to say, where is safe to touch. He settles for resting his hands gently on Ryan’s sides and rubbing small soothing circles there with his thumbs. He hadn’t expected this outcome, hadn’t prepared for it. All this intimacy all at once, unprecedented in their waking lives.

He braces himself for the fallout. Will it be fight, flight, or freeze?

He’s equally unprepared to feel Ryan reach between them and slide into Shane’s boxers to grip his dick with a warm, shaking hand. All he can do is hiss in surprise and buck up.

“Can I?” Ryan asks.

“Kinda seems like you already did,” Shane says, voice so thick with sleep and want and surprise that he has to clear his throat. “But please.”

Ryan’s hand is slick somehow—from his own come, maybe, and the thought makes Shane’s dick pulse into Ryan’s hand as he strokes. The angle is awkward and Ryan’s unpracticed, but Shane was close when he woke anyway, closer than he would have been had he been awake the whole time. It doesn’t take much before he’s shaking apart under Ryan’s hand, right on the edge.

Then Ryan turns his face to press his mouth to the scar on Shane’s chest, such a simple gesture, and Shane comes gasping Ryan’s name into the crook of his own elbow. He’s shocked by the strength of it, like the orgasm’s been ripped from him by force.

It feels like forgiveness. 

After a long minute, Ryan wipes his hand off on Shane’s sheets and carefully rolls off him. He flops onto his back on the other side of the bed, long since gone cold.

“Huh—”

“That was.”

“Thanks?” Shane says. He’s not sure what else a person’s supposed to say after having one of the weirdest, best sexual experiences of his life. He’s a little worried this is going to be a thing for him now.

“ _Thanks_?” Ryan says, incredulous. He turns his head to look at Shane, finally, and his hair is sticking up at amazing angles.

“I don’t know what I’m saying!” Shane says.

Ryan flicks on the lamp. He gets up from the bed and grimaces.

“Got a spare pair of boxers I can borrow?”

“Top drawer of the dresser. Grab me a pair too.”

Ryan rummages around and comes up with a pair for himself and one for Shane.

“I’m just gonna—bathroom,” he says, crooking an awkward hitchhiker thumb in the direction of the door. He stops in the doorway. “I’ll come back, though.”

Shane _had_ been wondering.

Shane changes into clean boxers, and then he changes the sheets because it seems like the polite thing to do. As he’s stripping the sheets off the bed, something falls out of them and clatters to the floor. A little hardcover book.

_Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure_ , by John Cleland.

Shane starts to page through it. It gets filthy almost immediately, and he starts to get kind of into the plot, such as it is. He’s almost a full chapter in and there’s some truly dirty girl-on-girl about to go down when Ryan comes back from the bathroom. He’s wearing Shane’s boxers and no shirt, and it’s a lot of look in a _great_ way.

“Hey,” he says. He scoots back over across the bed, making room, and Ryan clambers back into bed.

“Doing a little middle-of-the-night reading?”

“It’s that book,” Shane says. “The one with the, you know, _sturdy stallion_. I found it tangled in the sheets.”

Ryan raises his eyebrows. “Exhibit F.”

“And Exhibit G,” Shane says, gesturing at the bed and them in it, referring to everything that’s passed between them tonight, both asleep and awake.

“So _this_ happened,” Ryan says. “But I’m too tired right now and I want to—I’m afraid I’ll say something the wrong way.”

“We can talk tomorrow,” Shane says. He’s relieved to get a little time to think about this, about what it means for him, for them, for the show.  He gestures with the book in his hand. “Why don’t we sleep in shifts so we can get some actual sleep? You take the first shift, I'm eager to see how this turns out.”

“Spoiler alert, it ends with boning,” Ryan says. He turns over, away from Shane, to go back to sleep.

“Does it now. Very meta,” Shane says mildly. He dodges the pillow that Ryan aims at his head.


	6. Lay Me Down and Say Something Pretty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is mostly a sex-and-feelings interlude with side helpings of interior decoration, regrettable text flirtation, and Ryan Bergara's biceps. Look, the heart wants what the heart wants.
> 
> Yes, my kink _is_ the way Shane says "Oh, Ryan," right after Ryan's said something almost unfathomably dumb. No kinkshaming.

Ryan sleeps the first shift, and then he’s up at six so Shane can sleep for a few hours. It’s Saturday and they don’t have anywhere to be, anything specific to do.

He considers quietly gathering his stuff up, sneaking out, and putting off the now-what conversation until Monday. It might be easier to have under the fluorescent lights at work, maybe at the desk on their Unsolved set, than it would be to have it in Shane’s living room. Just a few feet away from where they—well. But that’s the coward’s way out, and Ryan’s too stubborn about this, he’s already committed.

In the end he does get up, just because he’s not having much luck watching Netflix on his phone. His eyes keep straying from the screen to land on Shane. In sleep his face is relaxed and his features look bigger, his whole face younger. It’s starting to get a little sappy, and Ryan thinks, _okay, this is pathetic_ , and he slides very carefully from the bed.

He spends a little time in the bathroom, splashing water on his face, peering into the mirror like it will tell him something he doesn’t already know. He half expects to look different, the way he feels different, but in truth it’s the same old face staring back at him. He plays a few games on Shane’s PlayStation, the sound turned all the way down. He very quietly rearranges the furniture in Shane’s living room, both for the look on Shane’s face and because he’s always felt strongly that the couch would look better on the far wall.

By the time 9:00 rolls around, Ryan’s starting to feel like a kid on Christmas morning waiting for his parents to get up. He’s run out of games to play, social media to scroll through, and things to arrange. He pulls a rag and some Pledge out from under Shane’s kitchen sink and starts dusting.

By ten, he’s had enough. He marches into the kitchen to start loudly cooking breakfast. He’s not a very good cook but he can scramble eggs, more or less. A dig through Shane’s fridge also reveals a couple of strips of bacon, some of that bagged stuff that barely counts as cheese, and a leafy green that could probably be the makings of an omelet.

He sets to work as noisily as possible—slamming pans down on the burners, clattering around the fridge. The bacon sizzles loudly as it does its work, and the coffee starts to percolate, and soon the whole room smells amazing.

Ryan senses rather than hears when Shane walks into the kitchen. He looks up from the pan, where he’s just carefully flipped a massive and truly ugly omelet, to see Shane leaning up against the counter and watching him. He’s all sleep-rumpled, hair all over the place, the crease from a pillow embedded in his cheek, and Ryan has to fight back the urge to lean over and kiss him, morning breath be damned.

“Did you make breakfast?” Shane asks, even though the answer would appear obvious.

“I just threw some stuff together.”

“Right,” Shane says, nodding, like this is a perfectly normal extension of his Saturday morning routine. He pours himself a glass of water from the tap and swirls the water around in his mouth thoughtfully. “Did you…did you redecorate my living room?”

“I had some time. Like it?”

“Yeah, sure. Did you—move the couch by yourself?”

Ryan just shrugs, and Shane rolls his eyes fondly. He pulls down two plates from a cupboard and grabs two forks from a nearby drawer.

“Jesus. We get it, Ryan, you have arms.”

Ryan cuts the omelet in half and slides half onto each plate.

“Yeah, well. I thought about leaving, so.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Shane says, meeting Ryan’s eye, and he takes his plate into the living room to plop down on the couch. “Did you _clean my apartment_?”

*

For a while they don’t talk about it. They talk about everything else: what happened at work this week, and how the upcoming season is shaping up in the editing room, and how many views the trailer has already, and how Ryan’s brother’s got his fourth speeding ticket in as many months and Ryan thinks he should be forced to rely on Lyft forever. Shane keeps swiping his finger along the side table like he’s expecting to find dust.

Eventually, though, they run out of other things to say.

“So what’s your big theory, then?” Shane asks around a mouthful of omelet.

“Big theory?”

“In the dream, you said you were working on a theory and I’d hate it.”

“Oh yeah,” Ryan says, and he snickers, because Shane _will_ hate it. It’s objectively a ridiculous theory, and yet it does fit, and Ryan hasn’t been able to let go of it. “This all started in Point Pleasant, right?”

“Right,” Shane says. He narrows his eyes at Ryan, as if he can see where this is going and he does not care for it.

“And, well.  Mothman’s known for interfering with peoples’ dreams, isn’t he? Making people see premonitions, warning people of impending doom, just generally fucking with their heads. Right?”

“ _Ryan_ ,” Shane says, his voice an exasperated warning. He throws his fork down on the plate with a loud clink.

“Do you remember when our lights went out and the camera stopped working, and then we saw that thing in the sky?”

“It was an owl.”

“Or—“

“No. No, Ryan. _Ryan_. No or.”

“Or Mothman’s messing around in our brains, man!” Ryan says it in an excited rush, trying to get it out before Shane can tell him no again.

Ryan knows it’s crazy. He knows it is. But the thing is, everything that’s happened to them in the last few months has been crazy. He doesn’t see why Shane should be able to accept the fundamental premise—that their shared dreaming is real, it’s happening—but draw the line at blaming a supernatural being for a flagrantly supernatural situation.

“Let me get this straight. You believe a cryptid that doesn’t exist is making us dream weird dreams together. Even assuming Mothman is real, which I do _not_ concede, what possible purpose would he have with us?”

“That’s the gist,” Ryan says. Shane has a way of phrasing things so that they sound even sillier than they are, so that Ryan feels embarrassed for things that made perfect sense in his head ten minutes ago. “I think he’s trying to, to. To influence our future. You know, in a banging way.”

“Influence our…oh, _Ryan_. You think Mothman is interfering with our dreams so we’ll bang it out? Just, like, jerkin’ it watching us spend whole months of our lives getting weird boners and avoiding eye contact?”

“Yes?” Ryan says. It comes out as a question rather than a statement, because now that Shane’s said it out loud it does seem a little farfetched. He hadn’t bothered to consider why an interdimensional being might take interest in a couple of goons like them. It does sound an awful lot, he concedes, like the insane ramblings of a person grabbing out for any possible excuse for why this is happening other than _welp, guess I like dick now_.

Shane sighs, “You’re right, I do I hate it,” and Ryan’s stomach twists.

“I’m sorry,” he says, harsher than he intends. “It hasn’t been a picnic for me either. But nobody made you—” he stops and shoves the rest of his omelet in his mouth in one enormous bite. When he makes himself look at Shane, Shane’s expression has softened and he’s set his own plate aside.  

“Not that,” Shane says. “This isn’t about that, so please don’t think...I just, I hate this _spoo-ooo-oooky_ garbage.” He wiggles his long fingers in a way that is frankly distracting. “I hate that I have to consider it a possibility because I don’t have an actual scientific explanation for this.”

“This is an embarrassing way to be wrong about the supernatural,” Ryan says with a grin. “Caught with your pants down on that one, big guy.”

“The next time you fall asleep in my presence I’m going to strangle you,” Shane says very calmly, and then he’s quiet for a long moment, considering. “Okay. Okay. Let’s say—hypothetically—that you’re right. Let’s say the Mothman is real, and he’s really bored or horny or whatever, and he’s been fucking with us every time we fall asleep in the same place in order to orchestrate some grand sexual awakening. How do we make it stop?”

The question unexpectedly stings a little, and Ryan has to remind himself that this is a massive inconvenience at best and danger at worst for him and Shane both. No matter what has passed between them or might in the future, they still need to be able to get a restful night’s sleep in the same room or one of them will wind up dead in a way that the other will have a very difficult time explaining.

He also has to figure out the right way to say what he needs to say, now. What he _wants_ to say. But ideally without making it sound like he wants it too badly, even though he does want it. Badly. And he can’t shake the little voice in his head that’s saying _he’s going to laugh at you, Ryan. He’s going to be disgusted. How could you ever think—_

“I think maybe,” Ryan says slowly, like he’s just now thinking of this for the first time, like it’s just occurring to him, like it is a Brand New Idea, “maybe, if that’s the case, we just have to give him what he’s after.”

“What he’s aft— _Ryan_.”

“I wish you’d stop saying my name like that.”

“Well, how do you want me to say it?” Shane shoots back.

“Ideally with more, you know, panting and moaning, _Shane_ ,” Ryan says, a little snappier than he means to and with at least 75% more honesty, but it’s worth it for the way Shane’s eyes go wide as he pushes his hair back from his face and passes his hand across the scruff of his beard.

“We absolutely cannot fuck just because Mothman wants us to. Not to get precious about it, I like getting laid as much as the next guy, but that is not a good enough reason to have sex. And also, well---didn’t we already, sort of? Last night, I mean.”

Ryan gathers his legs beneath him, pulled in a tightly coiled pretzel on the couch. He can feel that he’s making himself as small as possible, guarding himself from the rejection that’s seeming more and more inevitable. He thought last night that they were on the same page, maybe, but in the light of day Shane’s reason seems to have overtaken whatever mutual understanding existed between them in the dark.

He takes a deep breath, summons his last ounce of bravery, and says, “Well, there’s also…it would be fun, wouldn’t it? Last night was, it was fun. For me. I think it might also be fun to experience it fully awake. I don’t think last night counts, really, since we were. We started it asleep.”

Shane exhales, hand still half-over his mouth. He looks at Ryan with owlish appraisal behind his glasses and Ryan does his very best not to shrink away or make a joke or wave it off. He wants to, so badly his palms itch, but this is too important.

“I don’t think it would satisfy the parameters of whatever the Mothman counts as real. And I’m not sure it satisfies me either.”

“I have to tell you,” Shane says at last, “that if this is all an elaborate ruse to get me into bed, you could probably have just saved yourself the trouble and asked.”

“I—what?”

“I’m just saying,” Shane says, palms spread wide. “Like the whole, _oh, Mothman wants us to bone down, otherwise he’ll kill one or both of us in our dreams, Shane_ , thing.  Bit over the top.”

“I really do think Mothman wants us to bone down,” Ryan says, blinking back his surprise, trying to ignore the way his bullshit meter’s going off the charts. “But also, fine, I’m asking.  These dreams, I can’t, I want—I can’t think about anything else and it’s really messing with my head.”

“I want us to take a little time to think about it,” Shane says. “Go home, chill out, get some sleep, whatever. Hydrate. Come back tonight.”

“And tonight?”

“If you’re still into it—you, for yourself, for real—then yes.  God yes.”

Ryan’s satisfied with that outcome, but he’s not satisfied with Shane’s claim: _You could have just asked._ He stands up from the couch, shoves his hands in his pockets, ready to go retrieve his pillow from Shane’s bed. He doesn’t mean to call Shane out—they bust each other’s’ asses a lot over the little things, but when it comes to the big things, they let each other get away with a lot—but in this case it can’t be helped.

“You know what, Shane? You’re such a goddamn liar,” he says, poking Shane in the chest with an accusatory finger for emphasis. “If I’d come to you, without all of this, if I’d suggested you break off a piece of the ‘ol Bergara—you’d have laughed me out of the fuckin’ park. You’d have turtled into your shell so fast my head would spin, and then before I even knew what happened we’d be just two dudes who make awkward small talk over the water cooler.”

Shane blanches.

“So don’t act like this is some chill thing you’re just rolling with because I’m here and you’re bored. This is—I’m scared shitless here.”

“The very last thing I am right now is _bored_ ,” Shane says, fingers laced together in a complicated web across his knee. “You’re right, that’s exactly what I would have done. Being flippant about this, being funny, is all I know how to do.”

That’s all Ryan needs: an admission that Shane’s nervous too, that he’s made a full consideration of the risks versus the rewards and ultimately decided that whatever it is they’re about to do is worth it.  He feels like they’ve laid their cards on the table now, or close enough; they’ve called _something’s_ bluff and they’re going to play the hand through to the end. They’re going to win big or they’re going to bet it all and lose.

“Okay, well. I’m coming back later tonight and I’m bringing my A-game with me, so be ready.”

Shane just laughs. “Noted. _Break off a piece of the ‘ol_ —Jesus. What is wrong with you.”

*

If Ryan had taken the time to think about it, he would have assumed that scheduling sex would take all the fun and spontaneity out of it. Would make it less exciting. Over the course of the day, though, he finds that’s not the case. Everything he does is laced with anticipatory pleasure and a sort of nervous energy.

He goes home and takes a long, hot shower. He thinks about the night before and he gets himself off, back against the wall of the shower, shoulders tight with tension and a fierce sort of desperation he hasn’t felt in a long time when he remembers Shane under him, twitching under his hand. The noise he made before he came, strangled and helpless.

Ryan eats a late lunch and goes to the gym. At the gym he pushes himself, runs harder and further than usual, lifts more weight, wears himself out on the rowing machine. It feels good to get his muscles screaming, to make his body do what comes natural to it and then go just that little bit further. It feels like prep; and then, when he sends a sweaty shirtless selfie to Shane after agonizing about it for a full fifteen minutes, it feels like foreplay. 

 _Jesus take the wheel. Are you out in public looking like that?_ Shane texts back a few minutes later. He has this way of sounding stern and unimpressed even over text, and Ryan’s not mad about it.

 _can’t wait 2 cum over_ , Ryan replies. Then, with instant regret, _wait no please pretend i didn’t say that_ _ugh gross_

Two agonizing, incomprehensibly long minutes later, Shane’s reply: _[Wheeze]_

At 7:00 he’s knocking on Shane’s door, wearing a short-sleeved button-down with the cuffs rolled that makes his arms look good, not at all sure what to expect. He thinks maybe they’ll dither for a while, get a little drunk, work themselves up to it. Maybe Shane will back out. Maybe _he’ll_ back out.

Shane opens the door, though, and it becomes immediately apparent that Shane isn’t going to back out. Shane has finished all his dithering. Shane is officially all dithered out.

He invites Ryan in, and he looks good; that pink Oxford with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, God. And then he closes the door behind Ryan and immediately slams Ryan back against it, hard, so hard his head almost hits with the kind of impact that can ruin a night. He presses in close, so Ryan’s forced to look up at him, and bends down to kiss him fiercely.

It’s a great kiss, a fantastic kiss. Almost suspiciously seamless, for a first kiss, until Ryan remembers that it’s only their first kiss in the very technical _awake_ sense, and isn’t that a strange feeling: to have done this before, but also not.

Shane’s not messing around, the handsy motherfucker; he’s got Ryan at the hip and very loosely around the throat, thumb stroking right over his jugular where Ryan can feel his pulse pounding as blood flows downward. He pulls back a little to nip at Ryan’s bottom lip, and then to press his mouth to Ryan’s neck right above the juncture of his own splayed thumb and pointer finger.

He pauses there just long enough to suck a mark into the skin, to tighten his hand just enough so that Ryan notices— _oh God, is this a thing? is this a thing I like?_ —and then he’s moved back up to lick into Ryan’s mouth again while his fingers start on the top button of Ryan’s shirt.

Just like that, Ryan’s forgotten to be nervous. All the anxious, doubting voices in his head are gone, rendered completely powerless by Shane’s obvious interest, hot against his mouth and hard against his stomach. He can’t doubt that Shane wants him, because Shane is _everywhere_.

“Shane, holy fuck,” Ryan says, eventually pulling away, breathless, having been mostly divested of his shirt. There’s nowhere to pull away to, really, since Shane has him pinned against the door like a butterfly in a shadowbox, so he just cranes his neck away and pushes up against Shane’s thigh to let him know he’s just taking a break and not bowing out.

“You can’t just, just _text people_ like that, you little shit,” Shane says, just as breathless, working on the buckle of Ryan’s belt with shaking, fumbling hands. “Actions have consequences.”

*

In the end, they don’t even make it to the bed. It’s better that way, Ryan thinks. Beds have too many other memories wrapped up in them now, and complicated emotions: desire, sure, but also shame and anger and fear and other things he doesn’t want to seep into this.  

He wants to be _awake_. When Shane comes he wants there to be no doubt that he did this, on purpose, with enthusiasm, with his own two hands or his mouth or—or whatever ( _the possibilities are dizzying_ ).

He’s got Shane laid out on the couch, taking up _all_ of the couch, and he has to stand up to yank off Shane’s jeans and underwear with one serious tug. Shane just looks up at him, impassive.

Shane’s hard, and flushed, and big everywhere—too big? Ryan’s not sure what to do with all of him, frankly, but it’s too late now to do anything but figure it out, and as far as problems go it’s not a bad one to have. He settles between Shane’s feet, looking him over.

“Wow,” Ryan says, because that seems like a compliment, and also because it’s what he’s really thinking: _wow_. He reaches to stroke Shane slowly and watches with a fierce jolt of pride when Shane shudders all over and the muscles of his stomach clench visibly. He knows how dicks work, of course, but it’s still fascinating to feel it twitch up to meet his hand.

A person could go a little power-mad like this.

Ryan’s always loved, more than anything else about sex, the feeling of accomplishment that comes from feeling a woman get wet under his fingers, under his tongue. It’s like working out: you put in the work, you get the payoff, and then you ride the endorphin wave to the dizzying finale. This is the same, but with the added bonus of instantaneous and visible feedback, and his head spins with how much he likes it.

He strokes Shane a few times, experimenting with his grip, but he can tell it’s too dry. Shane’s panting and he’s clearly enjoying himself, but he can also tell he’s on the verge of discomfort, of too much. He thinks about asking if Shane’s got lube, but it’s a lot, that word _lube_ , like it’s asking for more than he’s ready for.

He embraces the happy medium.

He scoots up, between Shane’s knees, and bends down to lick a wet line up Shane’s cock. His reward is a muffled curse—Shane’s got his palm pressed up against his mouth again like he’s trying to hide—and the pulse of Shane against his tongue.

“Fucking—fuck, warn a guy!”

“Mmm, my bad. Shane, I’m going to suck you off.”

He thinks Shane’s going to tell him to stop being smug, to stop talking and do it already, but when he looks up— _a dick’s eye view_ , _hah_ —Shane’s just watching him, eyes dark and serious, pupils blown wide. Ryan realizes he’s done it: he’s pulled the snappy retorts out from under Shane, gotten the last word at last.

And all it took was the promise-threat of a blowjob.

Ryan really applies himself, then. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, but he’s gotten enough blowjobs that his strategy is to blatantly plagiarize from the genius work of his betters. A tricky maneuver with a hand on the base of Shane’s dick and swirling his tongue around the head seems especially effective, judging from how Shane’s noises are getting increasingly desperate.

Ryan’s surprised by how much he likes this, too. It’s like the nervous fear-rush of performing and the satisfaction of getting the applause all at once. It’s like making a joke during filming and knowing instantly and intuitively that it’s landed. There’s a slightly wet, bitter taste that he can’t even be grossed out by because he knows it means he’s doing well, and it lands like praise on the back of his tongue.

He pulls off Shane with a pop and a delicate, apologetic lick at the head, relishing his groan.

“Are you _hover-handing me_?” Ryan asks. He looks up, and sure enough, Shane’s hand is hovering at his hip, above Ryan’s head but not quite touching it.

“I didn’t want to—freak you out, or—you seem to have things in, in hand,” Shane says. He’s got this lovely shell-shocked look Ryan’s never seen on him before.

“You’re allowed to touch me while your dick’s in my mouth,” Ryan says. He leans down again to bite gently at Shane’s thigh, enjoying the way he jumps.  “Just don’t, you know.”

It’s even better, then, because Shane rests a big hand very carefully on the back of Ryan’s head. He doesn’t push or pull, he just lets Ryan go at his own pace. He takes Shane a little deeper, starts to test the limits of his gag reflex, and Shane rubs behind his ear and down his jaw—not holding it open, exactly, just touching.

It’s so hot, and surprisingly tender, and Ryan can feel himself rubbing a little desperately on Shane’s leg from the attention. Shane’s making a lot of noise, more than Ryan would have guessed if he’d been asked to guess, and it’s all just a lot of sensations at once, feelings and sounds and smells and tastes flooding his nervous system.

Compared to the sensory urgency of real life, their dreams were nothing: like being underwater, or in a bubble.

He can tell Shane’s about to come because his whole body goes tense—legs and abs and the hand in Ryan’s hair. Ryan can feel it in his dick, too, a perceptible hardening where he didn’t think it could get harder, thickening and pulsing in his mouth, and all Ryan can think is _, I did this_.

“Ryan, I can’t, I’m going to, _hm_ ,” Shane whines, tugging a little, and suddenly Ryan has a decision to make that he somehow isn’t prepared for. _Might as well_ , he thinks sort of wildly, indulging the part of himself that’s an irredeemable show-off, and he goes all-in with more suction, more tongue, a faster, firmer grip.

Shane comes with a shuddering gasp, far enough down Ryan’s throat that he barely even tastes it. The negatives of this have been vastly overstated, Ryan thinks as he pulls off. What’s a weird aftertaste to this feeling? He could climb a mountain off this adrenaline alone.

Then Shane’s tugging him up to kiss him, which strikes Ryan as faintly surprising and kinky in a way he also would not have expected and which interests his own dick very, _very_ much. Shane’s handsy after, petting his hair, the back of his neck, his back, anywhere he can reach.

“Don’t you dare say ‘thanks’ this time” Ryan says, shivering a little when Shane grabs his wrist and twists it just a little, holding it against his own lower back.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Shane says, low in his ear. “Your turn.” He laughs when Ryan ruts against him involuntarily, holding him in place.

*

Before Ryan knows it he’s naked—so very, very naked—on his back on the couch with his legs up and over Shane’s lap, around his waist in a sort of lazy missionary. He feels exposed like this, but also he was too turned on to object when Shane arranged him where he wanted him. Ryan’s not about to stand between a man and his plan.

“What do you want?” Shane asks, rubbing hands up Ryan’s thighs so goosebumps pop up there. 

“I don’t know what I want,” Ryan says, “not ever,” and it’s the truest thing he’s ever said. This is the nakedest he’s ever been.

“I could try something,” Shane says, a little hesitant. “If you’re up for it. I looked some stuff up.”

“I’m clearly up for it, Encyclopedia Brown.”

Ryan’s so turned on he’s coming out of his skin. He reaches down to stroke himself, a little rebuke for Shane not doing it himself yet, and when Shane laughs at him he feels hot all over in a way that’s good and terrible at the same time.

“You’re a handful,” Shane says. “I don’t know what I expected.”

“More than a handful, thanks,” Ryan says, stroking again, letting his eyes fall closed and hissing through his teeth. “Were you planning to touch my dick at any point, or are you just gonna look at it?” 

“That’s no way to ask for things we want,” Shane says, but he’s reaching up to wrap his hand around Ryan’s on his dick, stilling his motion. He’s got a much smarter mouth now that he’s come, Ryan observes. Shane leans down to grab something from under the couch, and Ryan’s surprised enough when he comes back up with a bottle of lube that he forgets for a moment how badly he wants to come.

“Do you just keep lube stashed under your _couch_?” he asks, curious about whether this is an all-the-time thing or a special occasion thing. Does Shane keep lube hidden in all the rooms of his house like slutty Easter eggs? Does Ryan really not know him at all?

“Thought we might want it,” Shane says with a shrug. “I’m not about to get you off with a dry handjob like some kind of animal.”

“What with the opposable thumbs.”

Ryan doesn’t have much time to think, though, because Shane’s uncapping the lube and drizzling it on him, and the cold of it is shocking. He tries to squirm away from it, but then Shane’s hand is there, warming it up. All over him with firm, steady pressure, and oh _fuck_.

“This is going to be over so fast,” Ryan says in warning. It was over pretty fast last night too, although he can get away with blaming the dream for that and anyway it feels too good to summon any real embarrassment over it.

“Do you want it to be?”

“Yes—no—guh,” Ryan says, not helpfully.

Shane pulls his hand away and then lets it trail lower to roll his balls around and press cautiously behind them. He’s got a look of extreme concentration on his face, lower lip caught between his teeth.  

“Yes?” he asks. “Is this—something you like?”

It occurs to Ryan that maybe they should have had some kind of conversation before jumping into this together, a conversation that was less about whether their dreams were being haunted by a interdimensional being and more along the normal lines of _what do you like_ and _what are your limits?_ and _can I?_ and _will you?_

“I don’t know,” he admits, and he feels naïve, inexperienced, every moment of five years younger than Shane. “I haven’t, I don’t know.” He’s not sure he’s prepared to have an informed opinion about this, just because every new way Shane finds to touch him immediately becomes the _best_ way.  

“Maybe next time, then,” Shane says, and if he’s thinking anything he keeps his features studiously blank. That “next time,” though. If Ryan wasn’t very much in the middle of something he could get up and dance.

“No, I. You can.”

Ryan doesn’t say _I want you to_ ; he just thinks it very hard.

But of course Shane knows him like the back of his hand, knows this is as close to a “please” as Ryan’s pride and the tangled mess of his various complexes will allow, so he just smiles a sly grin and grabs the back of Ryan’s knees, pulling his hips up, shoving a pillow under them that he’ll no doubt have to throw away later.

“Should I, um, over?” Ryan asks. He’s got a rough idea of how this works, but Shane’s already shaking his head.

“I mean, you could,” he says. “But I’d rather look at you, if that’s okay.  I kind of feel like I missed out, last time.”

Shane drizzles more lube on his hand, warming it up between his fingers, and then he’s pressing down and very gently _in_ with the pad of a finger, discovering new nerve endings as he goes. Ryan jumps a little at the intrusion, even though he’d been expecting it, and he wills his body not to pull away. Shane pushes in a little more, and a little more, stroking Ryan’s thigh with his free hand.

He gets one long finger fully inside Ryan, and then he starts to fuck him with it, slow and steady. With his other hand he starts to stroke Ryan back to full hardness and then some, a display of multitasking that Ryan would have considered unlikely at best before getting Shane in bed. Well. In couch. 

And then he starts to _talk_.                                

“You know,” he says, very low-key, like he’s just talking about the weather instead of determinedly taking Ryan’s brain apart bit by broken bit and putting it back together new, “you’re too hard on yourself, Ry.”

“Hmm?” Ryan says. He’s not sure what’s happening here. It’s a lot to focus on all at once and he doesn’t think it’s quite fair that he be expected to carry on a conversation while Shane’s knuckle-deep inside him.

“You hide it pretty well, I think, from most people. But you don’t fool me.”

Ryan doesn’t know what to say to that. He’s not sure if he has to say anything, and just then Shane rotates his wrist and Ryan can only groan and give a little surprised laugh at the undignified sounds being pulled from him.  

“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to watch you beat yourself up all the time? Comb over every inch of yourself looking for flaws? As someone who thinks you are pretty great, I have to say it is frustrating that _you_ don’t think you are.”

“Is this supposed to be dirty talk? Because if so, I have to tell you, you are not great at it.”

Shane ignores him, but he does tighten his grip on Ryan’s dick and that seems like a fair trade.

“It was amazing to see you like this, earlier, sucking me off. You weren’t worrying, you weren’t thinking, you were just doing what you wanted to do and you were _so good_ at it.”

“More,” Ryan says. “Another. Another f-finger. God.”  

Shane slides a second finger in, so slowly. It is so strange but so great, and Ryan catches himself bearing down on them without having made the decision to do so, fucking himself on Shane’s fingers by some instinct or drive he can’t name.

“And now,” he goes on, twisting his hand again like it’s no big deal. “Look at you right now. You think you’re this burden, but you’re not, I should _be_ so lucky.”

“Better,” Ryan gasps. “That’s better—ah. Shane. M’gonna—”

“No,” Shane says, as if Ryan’s asked him if he wants any cream in his coffee, and Ryan’s not even aware he’d asked a yes or no question.  Shane pulls his hand off Ryan’s dick, which is almost unbearable, and he crooks his fingers inside Ryan, rubbing up against some spot in him he didn’t know existed. At least not like this.

“ _Dude_.” Ryan’s whole body is shaking now, a strange reaction to prolonged and subsequently denied pleasure that he couldn’t control if he wanted to, and he’s not sure he does want to.

“No, shut up, Ryan, this is my turn to talk. I know you wish I could see your dumb ghosts and demons and whatever, but I wish you could see what _I_ see.”

The pressure inside Ryan is building, it’s almost painful. His legs are starting to go numb. The intense vulnerability, the combination of brand new physical sensations and the low, steady rumble of Shane’s words, gives him the uneasy feeling he might burst into tears if he can’t come. Or maybe he’ll burst into flames, just ignite and burn up right there on the couch. 

“Do you want three?” Shane asks, and Ryan can only shake his head.

“I want to _come_. Jesus.”                                   

“Are you sure? Because I Googled some real weird stuff for this and it would be a shame if—”

“Shane!”

“You need to go easier, is all,” Shane says, and his eyes are so soft even during this deliberate torture that Ryan almost has to look away. “You deserve everything you’ve earned, and—”

“ _Is—this—sex—or—therapy—you—fucker_?!”

“No, this is me telling you that this means something to me,” Shane says simply, which is easily the sexiest thing anyone’s ever said to Ryan _ever_.

Shane reaches for Ryan’s dick and rubs his thumb under the head in tiny deliberate circles, barely a touch at all, and that’s it, that’s all it takes—he’s coming in helpless spurts all over his stomach, Shane rubbing him through it, letting Ryan clench around his fingers and dig ragged nails into his shoulders.

After he comes down from it, Ryan throws his hands over his face. He’s somehow gotten more naked.

“Stop looking at me. I can feel you looking at me.”

“You look good,” Shane says, and Ryan can feel the couch move as he gets up. “And I was mostly asleep for it last time. Sue me.”

Ryan can hear him pad down the hall, and then the bathroom sink runs. A minute later Shane’s back with a damp washcloth, warm but not hot, which he uses to wipe Ryan’s stomach and then presses into his hand.

‘Here—for the, hmm, lube situation. I didn’t know if you wanted me to.”

Ryan goes into the bathroom to finish cleaning up. When he’s finished, he looks at himself in the mirror, and he still looks the same—eyes red-rimmed from a few stray tears he never actually cried, hair all over the place, but his face is his own. He feels again different, not because of what they did but because of the things Shane said, the small but crucial way they’ve rewired him.  

A third evolution of Ryan Bergara, all in one day.

“I hope you’re satisfied, Mothman,” Ryan says into the mirror, in case something really is watching. “You fuckin’ pervert.”

They go to bed, tucked up close.

“Hey Ryan,” Shane whispers as they’re falling asleep. “Good game.”

“Good—good game?!”

“Yeah, that’s a thing sports dudes say, right?  I’m trying to make you feel cared for. You know, after.”

“How are you so bad at the before and the after parts of this but so good at the during? That is, that is worse than _thanks_ , is what that is.”

“I’m a work in progress too,” Shane says, and then he’s tentatively pressing a hand to Ryan’s stomach like he’s not sure Ryan will let him, tracing the curve of his hipbone and resting his palm in the vee of his abs. Ryan lets him.

_This means something to me._

_What does it mean_ , Ryan wants to ask. _Tell me more weird shit._

*

When they come to, in the dream, they’re at a bar. Ryan recognizes the scene immediately—Shane’s in his pink shirt still, or rather again.

“Maycie, you scoundrel!” Shane exclaims, grabbing a drink from their inebriated friend. “That’s mine!” His eyes meet Ryan’s across the high-top table, and he gives a sort of grimace: no dice.

According to Ryan’s theory, this wasn’t supposed to happen again. They were supposed to have fulfilled their end of this strange supernatural bargain, given the Mothman what it came for and become free to dream their own dreams again.

Boy howdy had they fulfilled their end—no one’s ever been more fulfilled than Ryan, in the purely fingerblasted sense—and yet here they are again.

Jen’s giggling next to Ryan, drunk enough that she’s not even a little uncomfortable slinging an arm around his shoulders.

“What a do, this is Real Mature!” she says with a snort, and throws back another shot like there won’t be consequences for it in the morning. Ryan supposes that for her, true dream creature that she is, a figment of his and Shane’s shared imagination, there won’t be.

Shane gets up and disappears. Five minutes later, by unspoken agreement, Ryan follows him out to the parking lot. It’s warm out but not uncomfortable, a balmy L.A. June.

“I love you in this shirt,” Ryan says, flicking at Shane’s collar. “Even then”—he means three years ago, when this particular Test Friends video was filmed— “even then I liked it on you. And I liked when you winked at me, although I didn’t know why.”

“I don’t think you knew why three _months_ ago, let alone three years, so don’t beat yourself up about it. Things happen when they happen.”

“I’m sorry this didn’t work. I really thought it would work, I thought—I’m missing something, but I don’t know what.”

“It was a really ridiculous theory, Ryan. Even for you. I went along with it because I wanted you and I was exhausted from the effort of telling myself I didn’t, not because I actually thought it would fix whatever this is.”

And maybe that was all it ever was for Ryan as well: something invented to get himself out of a psychologically tight spot unscathed. An excuse to push for something new, something better.

“Why did we come here, tonight? Why this place? What am I supposed to understand?”

Ryan’s frustrated. He thought he had all the pieces, but somehow they won’t fit together right. Whatever this is, the fact that it’s still happening means he isn’t _done_.

“Come on,” Shane says, bumping into Ryan’s shoulder with his own. “Let’s go get drunk with our friends. It’s been a good night. We’ll figure this shit out tomorrow, or we won’t. Either way, baby, we’ll be fine.”

*

_I love you_

_in this shirt._


	7. Awake is the New Sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Awake is the new sleep, so wake up/  
> And do it, whatever it is."  
> -Ben Lee, ["Whatever It Is"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYGQOYXNzVQ)

Shane can’t believe—he simply cannot _believe_ —that he’s allowed Ryan to talk him into spending yet another weekend of his life in Point Pleasant.

He’s starting to think that Ryan is lowkey practicing some kind of witchery, because he has a way of asking Shane to do things Shane absolutely doesn’t want to do, usually in the boneless afterglow of sex, and then just _looking_ at him until Shane hears his own voice saying “yes.” 

They’ve spent the last several months strategically analyzing the boundaries of their shared dreaming, testing the system for weak spots they can exploit to bring the whole thing crashing down before it’s time to start traveling for the next Supernatural season.

They discover that geographically speaking, the shared dreaming is stronger the closer they are; sometimes they can get away with one of them sleeping in a bed while the other sleeps on the couch a room away. More often than not they can’t sleep in the same bed more than once a week before it’s too much, before the dreams shift from benign to sharp-edged.

Intimacy triggers stronger dreams too. The nights they accidentally fall asleep together after sex, or even after a long talk about something more meaningful than the movies they’ll watch this weekend or the latest work gossip, produce dreams so fraught and heady that even Shane’s afraid of them sometimes. They wake up from those dreams too exhausted to function the next day; Shane a bleary-eyed mess at his desk, Ryan spilling coffee all over himself, their coworkers orbiting around them with a delicate, studied politeness Shane wouldn’t have thought them capable of.  

Finally, after two months of trial and error and exhaustion and going to sleep in separate beds, Ryan brings up the M-word again.

“Shane,” he says, poking Shane on the arm to keep him awake. Shane thinks he’s about to get up and head for the couch, but then he pokes again. “Shane, I want to go back to West Virginia.”

“…Said no one ever,” Shane says.

“No, shut up, I’m serious. What if the only way to fix this is to go back to where it started? I wanna confront Mothman on his own turf, man.”

Shane sighs, pressing his face into the pillow for just a few seconds, long enough to conceal his real frustration and summon the lightness Ryan will be expecting.  

“You think we’re gonna find, what, some clues in the woods or something? Trace our steps like the Hardy Boys? Should we bring our chums Biff and Chet along for this one, do you think, or would the constant erotic energy we exude make them uncomfortable?”

“No, I just—do you ever just have a feeling you can’t explain?” Ryan looks cross with him now, and Shane can’t help but prod at him a little just to watch the color rise on his cheeks. Even now, possessed with a brand-new arsenal of ways to make Ryan Bergara flush and squirm, this is still one of his favorites.  

“The last time you had a _feeling,_ we fucked because you thought Mothman wanted us to. Now you think it’s important, like just _really critical_ , that we fuck in the woods? Are you sure you’re not just already getting bored of having sex with me in normal places?”

“I didn’t say fuck in the woods!”

“Okay, plucky boy detective,” Shane says. Really this is getting a little silly. “You and I both know that if we go back out to those woods we’re gonna fuck in ‘em, and then you will complain the whole plane ride home about how you have tree bark embedded in your back and now you’re part tree-person.”

Ryan reaches out and presses two fingers to the vulnerable skin at the inner crook of Shane’s elbow, and he just _looks_. Any momentum Shane is building up in the way of mockery leaks out of him, just like that. He’s so weak for that look, and he hates that Ryan knows it.

“If we don’t go, I’ll always wonder,” he says, and Shane’s done for already.

“Ugh, fine. Fine. We’ll go to the stupid woods and fuck in them probably and nothing will change and you’ll be disappointed all over again. But fine.”

Ryan beams, and honestly Shane would do much worse things than go to West Virginia if it will make him smile like that.

“We’re not going to fuck in the woods. We’re just going to investigate. We’re going to fix this.”

*

By some miracle of nature, it’s actually less hot in Point Pleasant than it is back home when they find themselves there the first weekend in July. L.A.’s in the middle of a relentless heatwave, so when they arrive in West Virginia the 75-degree weather is a welcome relief.

They check into the hotel first, the same hotel where whatever this is started. One bed this time, on purpose, and just looking at it makes Shane’s palms sweat. They haven’t really talked about what they are to each other, not yet. Whatever they are, they’re one-bed people now.

Ryan drives them by the local Piggly Wiggly (“What an unbelievably stupid name for a grocery store”) and they walk the air-conditioned aisles, grabbing things for dinner on a whim: premade sandwiches from the deli, some junk food, and a couple of nectarines because sometimes Shane worries that Ryan will get scurvy. They pick up a couple of six-packs of some local cranberry wheat beer.

Then they drive out to the woods. They wander a little, Ryan carefully retracing their steps, and Shane tries to ignore the growing uncomfortable pall of déjà vu that’s hanging over his head like a thunder cloud.

Ryan cups his hands around his mouth and makes that stupid squeaking noise as loud as he can, a high-pitched “eeeeeeee,” and Shane’s déjà vu tips over the edge from a low-level background thrum to an insistent tug.

“Are you…doing the Mothman call?” Shane asks, incredulous. “You know we made that up, right? It’s not, like, a thing that works for summoning him. It’s a thing we thought would be funny on camera.”

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan says, and he makes the call again. “You don’t know what works and what doesn’t.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Mothman!” Ryan shouts. “Come out, you creep! Face us like a, hmm. Moth? Bat-thing?”

Nothing happens, obviously. Shane claps Ryan on the shoulder, and it comes off a little more condescending than he intended.

It’s amazing how much stupider this feels without the cameras—and Shane feels pretty stupid even with them, sometimes. Ryan’s on high alert, scanning the treetops for a creature that almost certainly does not exist, squinting into the evening sun behind his sunglasses.

They arrive at the abandoned TNT bunker by about 7 pm. When they’d been here before it had been dark, and Shane had only gotten the sense of the thing—big and moss-covered and frozen.

“It looks like one of those hobbit houses from Lord of the Rings,” Ryan says, and it does, except for the massive metal doors with the warnings plastered all over them. A new thought occurs to Shane.

“I wonder if it’s radiation poisoning or something.”

‘What?”

“The dreams. We might have been exposed to something the last time we were here. They stored hazardous waste here, right?”

“I don’t know what was here exactly, but they weren’t nukes, just normal explosives. No radiation.”

“But the byproducts of TNT can be harmful when they decay,” Shane presses. He likes this answer a lot more than Ryan’s Mothman hypothesis.  It’s still a little out there, but it does have the undeniable whiff of science about it; he’ll even take pseudoscience over nonsense.

“What, like we’re mutants now?” Ryan cocks his head, considering. “What about TJ?”

“What about him?”

“He was in here with us, but I didn’t have any weird dreams the night in Savannah after we—when I stayed in his room.”  _After we fought. After you were a dick._

“Well, he’s a strong-willed guy, Teej. Maybe he’s impenetrable to poisoning or mutations by sheer force of Teejness. Or, shit, maybe he’s been secretly able to fly or something for the last six months.”

They stand in shared silence, leaning against the earth-covered walls of the TNT igloo, contemplating the possibility that TJ could have been concealing a secret superpower this whole time. He’s a weird enough dude that Shane’s not sure he would have noticed if this additional weird thing was piled on top.

But the more Shane thinks about it, the more the theory falls apart under scrutiny. Lots of people come out here hiking, or Mothman-hunting, or just to gawp at a bit of recent military history. If there was an entire network of mutants poisoned by munitions storage facilities, he would probably have heard something about it by now. Ryan, with his encyclopedic knowledge of American conspiracy theories, would _certainly_ have heard.

“Maybe we shouldn’t be here,” Ryan says finally, looking around the eerie empty space. “Just in case. If there’s something in the air, we’re not helping anything if we get a fresh dose of it.”

“Yeah, let’s leave,” Shane says. “I’m hungry anyway.”

They meander around the woods for a while after that, looking for a place to sit and eat their sandwiches. Ryan doesn’t even know what they’re looking for, so they’re just taking paths they might or might not have taken in January. Every once in a while, Ryan twitches all over and whips his head around like he’s heard something, but all Shane hears are the normal nature sounds: twigs cracking under their feet and birds chirping their sunset noises.

 Eventually Shane’s stomach growls so loudly that Ryan laughs, and they stop at the edge of a meadow to eat. Ryan reaches into his backpack and pulls out the food, plus a towel he must have pilfered from the hotel bathroom.

“Is that our tablecloth?” Shane asks as he pulls the beer out of his own pack, watching Ryan lay the towel on a patch of mostly-bare ground and set the food out on top of it. “Was this whole thing an elaborate scheme to get me on a romantic picnic?”

“If I wanted a romantic picnic I wouldn’t drag your ass here to do it, big guy. You think I wanna get shot?”

Shane thinks about that, about how this little tableau might look if any other hikers come along: exactly like what it is, probably. Without their equipment they don’t look like ghost hunters, they look like two dudes on a date, and there are safer places for two dudes to go on a date.

They’re halfway through their sandwiches and most of the way through the first six-pack when Ryan suddenly pauses mid-bite and looks around.

“What?” Shane asks. “Hear something? The gentle beating of giant moth wings, perhaps?”

“No, I just—do you think they have bears here?”

“Ryan, I’m _so_ glad you asked. The state animal of West Virginia is the black bear, so I’m going with yes.”

“Fuck off,” Ryan says, but he looks uneasy. “How do you know that? Do you just keep an arsenal of bear facts locked and loaded to freak me out?”

“Nah, I looked that one up special before we came. Never say I don’t do anything for you.”

*

By the time they finish eating and nursing the last of their beers, Shane’s pleasantly buzzed and it’s nearly dark. They should probably sober up and get going; this whole thing’s been a waste of time and money, as he knew it would be, and they’re bound to have an exhausting night of dreamful sleep ahead.

Maybe they should have booked a second room, just in case it’s too much. He’d really rather not sleep in the tub. He is emphatically Too Big for the tub.

Ryan’s lounging against the trunk of a tree, having kicked off his shoes and socks to wiggle his toes into the soft, cool dirt at its base. The beer seems to have done a lot for his bear anxiety, as well as his general antipathy for the outdoors, because his face has melted into relaxation. 

“ _Whoa_ ,” Ryan says suddenly, and when Shane follows his gaze out to the meadow he can tell at once what’s caught Ryan’s attention: the field’s full of fireflies, little bright spots flickering in bursts of bioluminescence, weaving in and over the tall grass.

“Oh right, I forgot about this,” Shane says. He’s sure Ryan’s seen them before, but probably not a lot and not in such quantity—they don’t have many fireflies west of the Rockies. “We always called them lightning bugs, growing up.  Not a bad show.”  

“Whoa,” Ryan says again, and then he’s hauling himself up and walking out into the field. Shane watches him go, wishing he had a camera better than the one on his phone. It could be a scene in a movie, one he’d make fun of for being too cheesy—Ryan walking barefoot through wildflower-peppered grass as high as his knees and the lightning bugs all around him, and the moon starting to glow pale and full above him in the near-dark.

It looks, he has to admit, like magic afoot. Like it’s been drawn on a storyboard, just for them.

In truth it feels a little manipulative; something so picturesque, so perfectly designed to pull at his heart and make him starry-eyed, shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the real world. But here they are and here it is, and all Shane can do is soak up the rush of joy like a sponge. 

_Real. This is not a dream, it’s real._

After a few minutes Ryan jogs back over to their little copse of trees, a radiant smile on his face.

“It’s like a Disney movie.”

“All we need is a little rowboat. And a crab to serenade us. And some water to put the rowboat in.”

Ryan narrows his eyes. “I’m not the Ariel in this rel—in this scenario.” Shane hears the bitten-off word, _relationship_ , and his heart beats too fast in his chest.

“No, well, she was quiet,” Shane says, and then Ryan’s reaching for him, pulling him down and into a kiss with a punishingly firm grip on his neck.

“I’ll show you quiet,” Ryan says, practically into Shane’s mouth.

*

It is such a burden, being right all of the time.

Shane’s got Ryan up against the trunk of a tree, shirt rucked up around his armpits, shorts down by his knees. If Shane was a bear this would be the opportune time to go in for a good mauling, really catch them off guard, but he doesn’t say that out loud to Ryan lest it ruin the mood.

He runs his hand along Ryan’s stomach where it’s bared, tracing Ryan’s muscles where they heave and shift under the touch, running the tips of his fingers over the sparse sprinkling of hair under his naval.

Ryan’s back is bound to have scratches from the bark, just like Shane imagined. It’s basically like _The Secret_ : he has diligently visualized, and the universe has provided a positive outcome. He always thought was self-help bullshit, and yet here he is sliding his hand in Ryan Bergara’s boxer-briefs under a canopy of stars through no merit of his own.

He wraps his hand around Ryan, slick with spit, and strokes hard and fast. He doesn’t think anybody will wander along this path at nearly 11 o’clock at night—and how did it get that late, anyway?—but he’d rather not take the chance, and he’s filled with a feverish need to see Ryan get off immediately, now, _right now_.

“Sh—Shane, fuck!”

“Too much?”

“Nuh, no, just surprised.”

“How fast can you come?”

“Jesus, I—fast, if you, oh, _oh_ ,” Ryan throws his head back and winces when it hits a knot on the trunk. Shane knows by now that the answer is pretty fast, and pretty often: God bless youth.

“Good boy,” Shane says, just to be a prick, and laughs when he feels the cock in his hand pulse with responsive appreciation. There’s nothing like this, absolutely nothing as good as bringing Ryan off. He feels like a different person, a _better_ person, every single time he manages it.

Just a few more strokes, under a minute from start to finish, and Ryan’s coming into his hand and keening into his chest and desecrating a perfectly nice forest floor. Shane barely has a moment to catch his breath and revel in his accomplishment before Ryan’s scrabbling for him with single-minded ferocity.

“It can keep until we get back to the hotel,” Shane says, but Ryan’s already got his jeans open and past his hips.

“No, now,” Ryan says, and he’s practically babbling. “Shane, I want to—wanna fuck you. Not now, maybe not tonight, maybe some other time, but soon. Wanna.”

“What do you call this, a tax audit?” Shane hisses as the grip on his dick tightens as if to say _two can play this game._

“Don’t be an asshole, you know what I mean. Wanna _fuck_ you. Wanna come inside you.”

Suddenly Shane’s an awful lot closer to coming, just thinking about it. They’ve done, well, a lot, but not that—and he wants it, now that Ryan’s said it he wants it so much he’s almost too dizzy to stay standing.

“Oh my God, okay,” Shane says. Ryan’s hand is moving on him, hot and fast, and Ryan’s pressing words into his neck, beautiful elaborations of just how he wants Shane, how he’ll strip him and lay him out and ruin him.

It’s the best possible version of Ryan, raw and honest and stripped of fear and all _his_. Shane feels cracked open with how much he wants it all, and more besides. He wants to open his mouth to make a noise, to be responsive, but he’s afraid of what will come spilling out if he does.

Ryan moves in even closer, wrestling him against the tree, so there’s almost not enough space for his hand to work between them. He goes up on his tiptoes to put his mouth level with Shane’s ear, wraps his other hand around Shane’s wrist and holds him fast.

“Love you.” A fierce hiss, almost like he sounds mad about it, right on the verge of too quiet for Shane to hear. “Fucking come _on_ , Shane, I love you.”

Shane holds his breath, one extended frozen pause, and then he’s coming with a near-silent shudder, free hand gripping Ryan’s ribcage for dear life. He should say it, he should say it right now, but his breath is caught in his throat. The forest holds its breath too.

*

In the end, Point Pleasant doesn’t matter at all, although they’ll never know it. Point Pleasant is just the place where they happen to be when they free themselves.

It could have been in April, on a couch in Shane’s shitty apartment. It could have been the week before that in a shockingly blood-soaked hotel bed in Savannah. It could have been over the world’s most obscene sausage at Knott’s, or six months ago over a shared joint and a laugh at TJ’s expense. It could have been three years ago, after a wink and a shot in some nondescript L.A. bar, before this even got a chance to start.

It’s not about the where. It’s about the _what_.

*

“You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to,” Ryan says.

They’re lying on their backs at the edge of the field, looking up at the sky, in no hurry to leave. Shane really feels like visiting West Virginia in the dead of winter did it no favors, because like this, through a sleepy summer haze, it is wild and lovely.

“Great way to start a question, Ry. Really promising. Go on.”

“When you said this meant something to you, what did that…what was that? It was a while ago, I’m not even sure you remember that you said it, but—”

The idea that Shane wouldn’t remember is laughable, but he doesn’t laugh. Shane remembers every second of that day. He remembers taking two showers and changing his outfit three times. He remembers going to the store, buying multiple bottles of lube and stashing them in strategic locations all over his apartment. He remembers trying to talk Ryan down from the ledge of his own self-doubt the only way he knew how.

He remembers every word.

Shane thinks about how brave Ryan has been, these last months. Coming to him with this ridiculous idea, knowing how hard Shane would resist it, knowing it could easily have destroyed the show and their friendship to boot. Hauling himself onto Shane’s lap in a dream, knowing full well Shane would remember it when he woke up. Forcing the issue now.

It’s time for Shane to stick his neck out for once.

He turns to brace himself on his side, so he can see Ryan’s face and Ryan can see his, and then he turns his box of hidden private thoughts over and shakes it very hard until it’s empty.

“I guess I meant,” he says, “that I loved you.”

Ryan squints up at him, a half-smile frozen on his face that hasn’t figured out yet whether it wants to expand or collapse like a dying star. “You guess?” And then: “ _Loved_?”

Shane realizes how it must have sounded. He’s doing this all wrong, he’s ruining it with his equivocating and his hedging, this powerful thing that he only gets to tell Ryan for the first time once.

“No, no guess. I do. Love you. Have loved, do love, will love. All the tenses, basically.  Sorry, I, uh—I am really screwing this up, huh.”

Ryan throws both hands over his face. In a horrible flash of panic Shane thinks he’s stepped in it, ruined something good with his word vomit when it’s barely begun, and then Ryan huffs out a little laugh into his palms.

“You motherfucker,” he gasps, muffled. “Stop making a face like somebody died. How can you say such a nice thing like you’re telling me a fucking mine caved in or a hurricane took out a ship full of puppies or something?”

“Sorry,” Shane says again. He doesn’t know what to say, how to explain why saying this feels monumental to him, how it represents the demolishing of the very last protection he held back for himself. He just winds his bare ankle around Ryan’s and hope the message crosses over through their skin.

This has been his sticking point all along, really. Not that Ryan’s a guy, or even that Ryan’s _Ryan_. Just that the risk inherent to what they’re attempting here, the potential loss should they fuck it up, is enormous _._

He is a careful man, not in the habit of opening himself up to hurt. Not in the habit of letting himself want this much, in case the losing of it takes some essential piece of him that he can’t fix or replace.

“So,” Ryan presses. “If I love you, and you love me, then—then we’re doing this? We’re going to do this?”

Ryan is not, Shane thinks, the kind of person to throw around words like “commitment” or “boyfriend” or “partner.” Not because they’re inaccurate words but because they’re too glib somehow; not sufficient to describe whatever this complicated thing is.

“Yes,” Shane says with finality. “We’re doing this.”

“What about the dreams? If. If this doesn’t work.”

Shane thinks about that. The honest answer, in this moment, is that he doesn’t _care_. He doesn’t give a shit about the dreams. He doesn’t care why they’re happening, and he doesn’t care why him, and he doesn’t care if sleeping in separate beds like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo is the price he has to to pay for everything he’s been given in return.  

“I don’t want to spend the rest of our lives trying to break some curse instead of just living,” Shane says, and he can’t tell if he’s just imagining the way the phrase _rest of our lives_ , this slip of the tongue, echoes across the meadow. “We’ll just have to get a two-bedroom or something. One of us can share with TJ when we go film, and just say we’re keeping things professional. We’ll figure it all out.

“How, though? How can you not care? How can you not need to know?”

Shane’s quiet for a moment. He lets his arm splay out to the side, and Ryan’s hand finds his own at once.

“Maybe some things aren’t for us to know. The dreams got us here, didn’t they? I wouldn’t have—I would never—I’d have let it ride, Ryan. For _ever_. Until I was an old-ass dude in a nursing home somewhere, telling all the orderlies about this hot idiot I used to know who thought he could talk to ghosts through a radio.”

Shane’s had enough of the Mothman nonsense. He wants to go home. He wants to go home to the hotel room, to either dream or not, and then he wants to go home to L.A. and fall into bed with Ryan for the whole rest of the summer. And then he wants to go home to Chicago, introduce Ryan to his parents properly.

He’s spent so long holding back that it’s like a dam has burst in him. He can feel adrenaline and euphoria pouring out of him, venting out and up into the humid air.

_This is real. I am awake._

Shane exhales, finally, and the forest exhales too.

*

From high up in the trees, the Creature watches. It is ageless and nameless, though humans have names for it. It watches the men leave its forest; unhooks its claws from their minds at last and lets them go free.

The Creature does not eat flesh or plants or any worldly thing. It feeds on human energy, on feeling _,_ on potential realized rather than squandered. On secrets laid bare and chances taken. On what the mortals call _love_ , but which is really time: time spent, and time promised.

Sometimes, when nothing could happen or something could happen, the Creature is there to tip the scales to _something_. It will find new humans in a year or two, when it is hungry again, and it will peer into their minds and see what they have to offer.

It isn’t cruelty, this interference.  The Creature admires the humans, who are doing their best as they flit in and out of the world. It is fond of them, in its limited way, and in the end they’ve all three gotten what they wanted.

For now it will fly off to its resting place to sleep a dreamless sleep, and so, at last, will they.   

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 1's title is from Alice in Wonderland. Events in chapter 1 reference the season 2 ep [“The Harrowing Hunt for Bigfoot.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWNyH56oXvY)
> 
> Events in chapter 2 reference the episode ["3 Horrifying Cases of Ghosts and Demons."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mx8JkGHaGUI)
> 
> Chapter 3's title is from ["Lemonworld"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCfWAVRR794)by The National.
> 
> Chapter 4's title is a quote from Jurassic Park.
> 
> Events in chapter 5 reference the Ruining History episode ["Was Ben Franklin in a Sex Cult?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix3JApnAF4w)
> 
> Chapter 6's title is from ["Baby, We'll Be Fine"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwni0kaRlJU) by The National. Events in this chapter reference the Test Friends video ["We Tried IV Therapy to Cure Hangovers"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ei5pHaPxG6w&t=194s)
> 
> Chapter 7's title comes from the Ben Lee song ["Whatever It Is."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYGQOYXNzVQ)


End file.
